I am a physically disabled visual and performance artist.
Since being diagnosed with a muscular degenerative disease in 2018, my identity has been a fluid and shifting one that includes frequent falls, walking sticks and a walker. I am visibly disabled.
There has also been an emotional journey of insights into societal and personal stigmatization of aging and disability and a shift in understanding of disability as difference rather than dis-ability.
In performance, I have focussed on my dis-eased and changing body, addressing precariousness and vulnerability through the lens of disability and aging.
In a series of performances addressing my disability, I investigated the emotional consequences of falling unexpectedly in public space, the stumbling between being visible and invisible. These included “Teetering on an Edge” for Pi*llOry in 2019, “making space”, screened in Photophobia in 2020, and “Precarious Gestures”, a performance for video for #CripRitual at the Doris McCarthy Gallery in 2022.
In my drawings I have been investigating the performative embodied within the act of drawing a line. The mark-making translates into performative action which in turn informs the making of the mark.
For several years I worked with artist, activist and performance artist claude wittmann and his practice of drawing with 2 pens, 2 hands and eyes closed. My drawings evolved into a series of internal self-portraits responding to changes in my internally perceived emotional and physical body, as body in process.
My drawings and other works have been exhibited in juried shows at the John B. Aird Gallery and the Propeller Gallery, as part of “Unpacking Pandemic Pondering” (OCADU & Gallery 1313) and in the Rendezvous with Madness Festival at Workman Arts.
In 2023, I created a residency called “Precarious Lines: Interactions with a Chair” at the Arcadia Art Gallery. I focussed on my daily struggle to get up from a chair, an almost impossible feat with severely weakened quadriceps muscles, and used the act of my own drawing as witness to this performance. I filled the gallery with a series of large charcoal drawings of hybrid beings on wheels, many small ink drawings and several videos.