I work as both a visual artist, focussing on drawing, and a performance artist.
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.
Since being diagnosed with a muscular degenerative disease and the need to use walking sticks and walkers, I have been making drawings of my lived experience with a disabled body. I speak from the precariousness of negotiating im/mobility through disability and aging, and being visually identified as disabled, a spectacle, something to be stared at, accommodated, and judged in silence.
During the pandemic my drawings emerged out of a daily drawing practice that I developed while working with artist, activist and performance artist, claude wittmann, and his practice of drawing with 2 pens, 2 hands and eyes closed.
For me, this evolved into a series of internal self-portraits responding to changes in my internally perceived emotional and physical body, as body in process. They were responding to pandemic fears, anxieties and isolation, superimposed, by necessity, on ongoing issues of vulnerability, disability and the precariousness of severely limited mobility.
These drawings became part of my ongoing documentation of the evolving dis-eased body and reflections on a strangely hybrid identity, attached to walking aids and no longer wholly human.
