Artist, Barbara Hammer: We have four areas of intelligence: intuitive, the intellect, emotional, and sensational. Each person has all those forms in them, but each one has a dominant one. Mine was sensation. That means that when I look at something, in the world. I feel it in my body.

My name is Barbara Jean Hammer. And my life has been lived in film.

I came out at a time when a lot of women were coming out. It was the same time I was coming out as an artist—had decided to be a filmmaker rather than a painter.

I came out with a woman, not knowing I was a lesbian, to San Francisco. And sitting next to her, while we were watching Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, her leg touched my own. And I felt this incredible rush—erotic rush—just through our knees. And I thought, oh my God, I’d never felt this for a woman before. And I decided right then, I can act on this or ignore it. I decided to act on it.

At that moment, or that night, my whole sense of touch increased. I began to be more aware of the follicles of hair on my body. The way they told me what space I was moving through. The way I was reinforced by touching a body similar to my own. This became the mode of my lesbian aesthetic, so that in my films, I want the viewer to feel in their bodies what they see on the screen.

Archival audio from: Oral history interview with Barbara Hammer, 2018 March 15-17. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.