Disability Arts Online

 I am totally looking forward to making an official start on my DAO Diverse Perspectives Commission conversations!

After sitting in residence at Salisbury Arts Centre last year and creating my first conversation/ text work they were keen to see me develop the possibilities. Initial talks with the then Director of Salisbury Arts Centre focused on a visual presention and People Like You, the exhibition, began to take shape.

I have already started on the preliminary writing, but it is important to me that words do not dominate my creativity. They leap so instantly into every situation, swamping the slow simmer that, given half a chance, will boil up into something visual, tangible and 3D.

My life-size figures are on such an evolution and for me, essential to the journey. I began creating them in 2006 and they are evolving to express the wordless things that lurk in hidden corners.

Working on them I can choose to fill the silence with music (which inevitably lures me away on parallel paths), or I can listen to the words that peep out of my subconscious to tease and chivvy me with their own need for expression. Here I mull over those persistent issues of equality, diversity and integration, I worry about the future of Disability Arts and, like a homing pigeon, the access issue is constantly returning.

 

 

Bodies take shape

under my needle:

surgical stitching

sees muscles swell and

contract, inch lower,

shift with the placement

of limbs. Limbs that form

with thoughts; ideas

prompt their creation,

ideas inform

their construction,

Ideas that by-

pass words; thoughts that

travel the careless route

to a reality

where fact and fantasy

dance together.