"I have to accept the challenges of working inside the limits of a small disc and obeying the strict rules of the striking, casting and finishing processes. But the clay is soft and it yields pleasantly, almost too easily to the touch of my fingers. Maybe, after all, these limitations are necessary. I welcome these odds - my medals are the result of a good fight against them - and at the end at least I can look back on a bravely fought battle."

"Clasp it in your fist, let your warmth enter the cold metal and then take it to the window. Watch it: The light hits some edges, hidden crevices appear, there are some mounds you had not even seen before. Feel the tension of the surface, There is life underneath. It is not a cold piece of metal any more: Trees grow here, bodies leap high, faces emerge. All of this is brought about by you, and only you can arrest this magic moment or change it at any time with a light flick of your fingers."

That's Dora in the picture above in March 2003 when she was presented with the J. Sanford Saltus Award for Signal Achievement in the Art of the Medal by the American Numismatic Society (ANS). (She is flanked by Stephen Scher on the left, who endowed a lecture that is presented every year in conjunction with the Saltus Award presentation, and Robert Wilson Hoge on the right, the ANS's Curator of North American Coins and Currency.)

The Saltus Award citation called Dora "one of the foremost, and most prolific, medallic sculptors of the 20th and now of the 21st centuries," "a premier artist of Canada" and "Canada's grande dame of medallic sculpture."