Firstly I would like to start by saying that my husband thinks that I use that word far too much. But I do feel that it is warranted. Whilst doing a lot of reading for the research part of my MA project and watching a documentary about degenerate art I finally understood what I want my MA to be and my work to say.
There will be 3 parts to my project: a sound and video (of a kind) installation; a photographic exhibition and an installation that launches a full on assault of the senses.
The work looks at ideas of the other and invisibility , with specific reference to disability in all its forms.
This work is extremely personal to me as someone with a physical disability (through illness); a mental illness (Generalised Anxiety Disorder, possible panic disorder) and a son who has autism and a physical disability. I feel that we inhabit a world where we treat disability with the same attitude we have to death. There are acceptable faces of disability and those which fill people with disgust and fear.
We approve of disability only when it is removed from ourselves; only when it is clean, and neutral and sanitized. We do not want it shoved in our faces. We want a backstory; that epic X Factor moment when we discover this person’s harrowing story and we view them as hero: it helps if they are attractive and if they can walk.
Our entire view of disability is wrong. We view those with physical disability as mentally incapacitated (when sat in my wheelchair I am often overlooked as people speak instead to my biped husband) and those with mental disability (whether through mental illness or that horrible term of intellectual disability) as being well and able and if they do not act as we deem necessary as miscreants. We fail to see what is really in front of our eyes.
Through this project I aim to tackle this head on, to produce a multi-sensory project that makes us question who we are and our assertions about what disability is and why we view it in a particular way.
