Dear Reader,
Today I gave a pecha kucha presentation about my art practice starting with my second year to now. Pecha kucha is a presentation format in which you have 20 seconds per slide for 20 slides to talk about your given topic in a snappy manner.
In my presentation I discussed how my practice has changed quite radically since last summer. I had initially wanted my art practice to be about environmental concerns. I wanted to make art that promotes change as I believe art is powerful and can make a difference. Due to there being so much support for the cute and cuddly endangered mammals I turned my interests towards the overlooked mini beasts. I wanted to raise awareness through my work as insects play a vital part in our ecosystem.
I made a lot of my own materials during the first term, including handmade paper made from junk mail and unnecessary doctor’s letters; and my own deckle and mould from a recycled screen printing frame. Due to my work being printed onto recycled doctor’s letters, it drew the viewer’s attention to the materiality of the work instead of what was printed onto it. My disability and health became the focus rather than the plight of the mini beasts.
This was a big changing point and led me to notice how the plight of the minibeasts is not too dissimilar to the struggles of disablement. We both live in an environment that isn’t adapted to us. To explore these similarities I started making small scale graphics that I posted around the university with QR codes to enlighten people.
After watching a video by Greenpeace showcasing ants protesting, I was inspired to have the mini beasts protest for me, as I did for them. Using toy insects I created staged protests for accessibility on campus. The insects held up placards protesting for equal rights. I called this protest the Matchstick March (due to the placards being made from matchsticks).
In the second term of last year, I decided to continue with these small scale protests and 3D print myself. I did this so that I could photograph a small scale version of myself facing the large scale obstacles I must over come each day. By the model me being so small I feel like it can really put into perspective how hard the day to day challenges of a wheelchair user can be. However, as I had nver done 3D printing before I didn’t anticipate two things; firstly, how long it would take to render and print myself and secondly how much the scanner would struggle to capture my wheelchair. My 3D printed Alice sadly looked like an empty version of myself with most of my wheelchair missing from the final peice. I named this work Disability Erased.
Since the 3D print of myself took so long, i began creating other works of art. I first painted some watercolour peices inspired by Kafka’s Metamorphosis. I was stricken by the work ‘Vermin’, this led me to create a series by the same name. I painted different disability aids with their insect counterpart, such as a wheelchair user plagued by spiders legs. I liked these works so much that I ended up sculpting the androgynous wheelchair user plagued by the spiders legs. I wanted to focuas my attentions to how disablement is veiwed in society, that much like the mini beasts I started with, people can feel squeamish and uncomfortable around the disabled. This work was a huge success and I look forward to doing more sculpture in the future.
The othe project I worked on was a short video peice of me navigating the university hallway from my wheelchair. This was quite a fun and inventing video as I intended to use it as an invitation. It is my mission to invite students and faculty alike to push their perspectives and try navigating the world from a wheelchair. I wish to further educate and promote change for accessibility on campus. I also wish to record an abled bodied persons potential stuggle to an inaccessible path.
Going forward, I hope to continue to explore disablement and the societal and social stigmas that come with it. I have ideas for a number of works that play with scale to challenge how people view disability.
I feel that my identity is concealed by my chair; when you look at my you see my disability before you see anything else. For most, the chair is all they’ll ever see.
