I made a big mural....It's kind of an enormous collage.  And, I suppose, it isn't all that typical, although why do you have to always do something so utterly typical and recognizable?….Actually, it was started in '88, through the winter and into the spring of '89.  I made collages....I loved doing it.  I thought I got some rather fantastic results.  Things that I didn't expect to see turn out so well.  And then, while I was doing that, I did something bigger with some torn paper.  Do you know what cale paper is?….It's tracing paper.  It comes in big sheets.  And I just tore it into all sorts of pieces.  I glued them onto the surface, so that when the thing is finished — and if there is some installation of a fan blowing — they will move a little bit....So, I put that aside, always thinking that I wanted to explore that some more, and now I have just done it.  I had to do it....

Well, it's all in paper, to begin with.  And it's in sections, which, of course, have to be put together to make a long continuous piece.  And it's a collage.  And the collage is pretty classic in its technique, except that I found a way to use a half-transparent, or let's say, translucent paper, to build up a quality of third dimension.  And that intrigued me so much when I discovered that, that I vowed I would have to go ahead and do this thing someday, which now I've just about finished....

And the whole thing is made only by tearing.  Nothing has ever been cut or painted.  lt's only just been torn....

     —from Barbara Shikler's “Interview with Dorothea Tanning” (unpublished), Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1990, pp. 174-175, 183-184.