Recently, I’ve been feeling ridiculously disabled. So when I got an invitation from the lovely Andrew Bolton to submit some disability art to a festival in Jakarta, I thought I’d make some ridiculous disability art.
And here it is up at the very top.
It’s 1 m x 1.5 metres: a mix of my digital art and drawing, my photography, and images of x-rays of my chest and elbow
I’m especially proud of how – bearing in mind my Ridiculous levels of Disability – I managed to make something completely new really quickly by including some repurposed earlier ideas and images.
There are two columns. The left picks out some of my multimorbidities; the right underlines the vibrance of my artistic response.
The three rows focus on, sequentially:
– My Special Eyes – look how I see
– My Special Breathing – trees and me breathe the same air.
Here I’m showing the tree-in-bud pneumonia that I had. Excitingly, that is the real technical term for what I had. But when I told the consultant that I had just been making some art about urban trees, he told me that my own tree-in-bud pneumonia wasn’t a particularly beautiful version. The cheek of it! So I thought I’d make my own ultra-cute tree-in-bud, nestling in / sprouting out of my chest
– My Special Movement : Have I moved your heart?
On the left you can see my elbow x-ray with the metal put in to glue the comminuted fracture in my elbow together. I’m feeling really squeezed by this – in real life as well as in this image. Squashed inside Inflexible metal, the bad effects expand a lot further than my elbow. I’m struggling to use the two sticks that I have previously sped about on. My poor left hand is now super painful – it’s being overused because my right arm is so not right.
My head though is still in full working order – I’m still dreaming of running through the stars.
If youre not in Jakarta yourself you can see the other entries here – my piece is at 1.48