Tangled Art + Disability Gallery, Toronto
August 2025
In 2025 I developed a new project called Finding Balance, to expand my performance practice of sharing the precariousness of my physically disabling body and of drawing from this experience to document and enhance its transformative potential. I wanted to walk without my walker, to walk without falling and to draw.
In the initial phase, I explored ways to draw the feeling of the moment when I was on the verge of falling.
Investigating the precarity of walking without mobility aids, I walked through my home, leaning on counters and chairs and walls for support, as Alexandra Gelis followed me with her cameras and then created a B&W split screen video of the walk called Finding Balance: walking in the house.
In the second phase of this project, in a residency at Tangled Art + Disabilty, I focussed on interdependence and risk, investigating the vulnerability in asking for and negotiating help from others so that I could walk without falling.
I invited 2 performance artists, lo bil and Jose Miguel ‘Miggy’ Esteban, to help me walk, supporting me with their arms so that I could walk without my walker. We developed mutual agreements about risk, fears, personal limits and interdependence.
I wrote “I will be responsible for avoiding risk as much as possible. You agree to leave space for joy in our act of caring for one another.”
And then we walked.
The final installation included drawings, a performance, contracts for mutual care and several videos documenting the performance of walking.
I acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts / Conseil des Arts du Canada.
