Beholding Relations

Piss on Pity

In two separate images, two illustrated bodies are depicted climbing a mountain. One person is carrying the other. The carried’s head is bandaged; it seems they were too injured to continue the climb alone. The carrier places the carried on their back and the journey resumes. Black text that says “What can the sick do for the sick?” and “limp, limp limp” are handwritten on the pages.

Perhaps we are to assume that the person carrying the other represents the non-sick, non-disabled bodies of the world. Maybe we’re supposed to believe that it’s the sole responsibility of these bodies to carry the rest of us to safety; to assume custody and dominion over us.

How could I take this stance when it’s always been the sick, the disabled and the dying that have helped me navigate a system that sees my worth directly tied to my perceived productivity? It’s the disabled bodies of the past and present that have carried me through this regardless of language, arbitrary borders and timezones.

So “what can the sick do for the sick?” The answer to that question will vary depending on who you ask. For me, it’s affirming that all human life is valid even if it’s tired and chronically ill. It’s being reminded that illness and disability are not signs of moral failure or lack of will. Like the illustrations of the climbers, it’s these affirmations that carry me when I question the validity of my existence.

You suck me in and spew me out
Sucked into a space both inside and out
In front of – and behind – your skin,
Layers of flesh, bones and innards
An uncomfortable space of deep intimacy and privilege
Yet your invitation seems grudgingly given
Demanding the right response – on your terms
What gaze am I allowed?
Do I dare assume equality?
Do I dare to contradict you?
Does my autonomy seek to wriggle out of your challenge?
But the hard edges are
Deceptively feather stroked by plant capillaries and fronds
I won’t get too comfortable
Sitting in the hollow of your pelvis
When bones are scaffolded by steel and strewn among flowers,
Their fragility held by pins.

I get it now – the anger
Of being locked into the medical diagnostic gaze
The loss of ownership
Your body scans belonging to an institution
Like the HeLa cancer cells of Henrietta Lacks, an African American woman,
Colonies of cells multiplying, as we speak, a new colonisation.
Lacks, aptly named, respect and permission.
The anger diminishes if humanity is the goal, not profit.

A light box plugged in.
A new world
A new language
Eco-crip, a cyborg, no, no computer implants, a cybotan, maybe?
A cybotanical future with green implants.
Digital art, data art, digitally produced – does AI disrupt the alliteration?
Being tugged by its roots
Stripping away layers of history, of racism and colonisation,
Naming buried artists
And shaming copyright protocols
Name under name, a pile of names, skewering the blinds of history
Exposing a different kind of privilege
They are all men.

Your unburdening is suffused with light and colour
Digitally produced, not plant based
No earthy browns of burial
No black of x-rays.
The fightback has begun.

– by Rahila Gupta

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Three artworks displayed on backlit X-ray boxes and shown in a row are all the same size, divided by a thin white border between each of them. 

Moving from left to right, the first work is a colourful, abstracted image in various green and yellow shades that simultaneously appears botanical and anatomical. In the centre, green and dark green columns travel from top to bottom, resembling the anatomical structure of a spine, but also large plant stems. Branching out from this are abstract shapes resembling leaves, petals and twigs in various shades of lime and yellow. Further from the central column, these branch out into green lines and curves that resemble a human ribcage. The entire structure forms an image of a torso, blending botanical and mechanical prostheses where the skeletal elements of the neck and spine would be. Towards the top of the image, on both sides, abstract yellow shapes suggest petals. Above this, in the top left and right corners, are lines of Punjabi script that read ‘ਅਪਾਹਜ ਸਰੀਰ ਵਿਰੋਧ ਦੇ ਸਥਾਨ ਹਨ’, translating to “Disabled bodies are sites of resistance”.

The second work is a colourful image in prominent shades of lilac, pink, black and green on a cream translucent panel, where botanical elements suggesting leaves and flowers merge with anatomical ones suggesting bones and joints, including the arch of a pelvis. There is also the appearance of mechanical elements such as screws, plates and devices that suggest bodily prostheses. The lilac, pink, black and green shapes arch around three lines of Punjabi script that read ‘ਅਪਾਹਜ ਸਰੀਰ ਗਤੀਸੀਲਤਾ ਨ ਪਾਰ ਕਰਦੇਹਨ’, translating to “Disabled bodies transcend mobility”.

The third work is a colourful, abstracted image in reds, pinks, greens and yellows that simultaneously appears botanical and anatomical. Two vertical columns of marks allude to flowers and other plant-like structures. There are also bold, dark red shapes that suggest bones, alongside other elements resembling mechanical screws, plates and prostheses. The columns bulge slightly in the lower third of the image and again are skeletal, suggestive of lower limbs, but their exact nature is unclear as the image also appears leafy. In the lower right corner is four lines of Punjabi script that reads ‘ਅਪਾਹਜ ਸਰੀਰ ਭਵਿਿੱਖ ਹਨ’, translating to “Disabled bodies are the future”.

In the first image, Robert is topless leaning against a Black man, who is supporting his neck and head. Robert is also supported by a cushion. They are on a beach, and Robert is looking directly at the camera. His feeding tube is visible at the bottom of the image which suggests some kind of impairment. This is a beautiful way of depicting care and dependency in an unapologetic way. While Robert is requiring physical help, his facial expression demonstrates control.

In the second, two men are having sex, seen through the reflection of a glass window which looks out over a red brick house. Robert is lying on his back while sucking a Black man’s cock, the man on top is guiding his cock into Robert’s mouth which demonstrates that Robert is vulnerable. Robert’s feeding tube is also visible coming out from his groin area. The man on top is holding onto Robert’s standing machine to provide him with some stability. This shows that we all need some kind of support in different moments while not detracting from the vulnerability Robert has given, such as his feeding tube being exposed and the way he cannot lift his head or arms. 

In the third, two men are having sex on a bed, a Black man is straddling another man whose legs are visible. The man on top is adjusting where his buttocks align with the other man. It is implied that the man on top could be adjusting or guiding the other man’s cock in a way that suggests that the man lying down could not do it by himself. We see a black tube behind the man on top as well as medication on the shelf on the right of the bed. This photo demonstrates some kind of connection between sexual activity and care, given the passivity of the man lying down. 

In Membranes, a colour still from a video work is a horizontal rectangle without a frame. The image shows a close-up of a person’s mouth with a black stick touching their lips. The mouth is open, and the stick pushes forcefully against the wet lips, causing them to turn inside out.

Cell coating layers or membranes could be referred to as a scientific term. We don’t say “my membrane” or “my cells”, as this creates distance from what actually occurs in an image. I would like to refer to it as “skin”. I see skin that acts as a barrier and protector of feelings, memories, thoughts, and all the organs that keep us alive. The entire video, including this still image, is abstract, making it difficult to identify a specific part of the body. This creates an intimate and welcoming atmosphere to explore internal emotions such as anxiety, fear and pleasure. The presence of plastic ropes and other metallic instruments adds an element of experiencing pleasure through pain. I refer to it as a kind of game because it reminds me of BDSM practices that involve roles and trust in each other. In this context, the membrane becomes independent, just like other body parts such as hair, hands and others, each with its own role. It evokes feelings as to how to survive, or to deal with inside / outside worlds and society. 

In Unwanted Contact… a black and white drawing is inserted into a double-sided hanging lightbox with a black frame, suspended with metallic wires in the space. The image depicts a composition resembling a human-bird-fish hybrid, drawn with thin lines reminiscent of a spider web or tattoo design.

This image of Sophie Hoyle’s is very personal and political at the same time. Dealing with mental health and showing how you feel is a very powerful statement. Even if you are dealing with your own fear and anxiety alone, you should have support to talk about it. Artistic practice allows us to find our own language to talk about our inner worlds. Mental health is still a big issue for many of us. It’s political because we’re looking for support systems and help, but we’re not getting it, we’re not being accepted for who we are.

I see this image as a dancing figure, full of feelings and memories. It connects us with similar experiences. I’m dancing along with it as I write this text. As a community of artists with different abilities, we take care of and support each other.

Nat Decker’s work offered me a powerful, playful riposte to the concretisation of ableism; the pervasive systems, environments and products that disparage, imprison and limit the disabled body and that perpetuate social or economic exclusion and psychic dissonance. By sharing visually engaging and dynamic versions of orthotic equipment in a variety of media, their work encouraged reflection on how my own activism in the 1990s pre-rights era was psycho-therapeutic and physically energising for me. Their work also stimulated consideration of my continuing internalised ableism, as someone who has inhabited a non-normative body in a profoundly disabling culture for most of my life.

(IRL) Quad Cane 1 is a CG fantasy rollator walker in a pale pastel blue, with four silvery wheels linked by randomly curling poles, swirling upwards to a single handle, shaped for fingers to grasp it. This work encouraged me to reflect on my own experience of orthotics: spinal bracing and plaster casting in the 1990s and the crutches I have relied on periodically after surgeries, and will shortly do again. Instead of the dull grey and white functionality, emphasising deficit, struggle and a stigmatised non-conformity, the artist has created a device that energises, revels in movement and conveys physical difference as a launchpad for flamboyance, flair and fun.

In Dream Mobile, a print on metallic paper is held to a white board with magnets. A swirly green fuzzy star with a metallic centre is below a pink extruded symmetrical organic design, next to a pink splatter. In the centre, abstract glowing green bodies dance, holding hands. Framed in a swirly pink border, there is a bed in the lower right corner with extra-long twisting legs. Dream Mobile has all the sinewy movement and flow characterising Nat’s art. I felt an ease submerged in its soft swirls, at odds with my default expectations of stiffness and pain and an effortful, lopsided gait that characterises my sense of my own physicality. I experienced a gentle encouragement to accept inhabiting a disabled body; to consider its resilience, its stories of love, pleasure and birth-giving; to take pleasure in what it can do, including what it once did but can do no longer. Within its gentle dreamy pastels, I found pride and compassion for my one, disabled body.

First, there is a landscape-format image, of black inked onto a pale background. The black silhouettes two pale shapes, a hemisphere intersecting with a half-hemisphere. The full hemisphere has markings suggesting rounding. We’re not sure what we’re looking at; it seems almost organic, but also functional. At the top of the image, there are two marks which could be drops of blood. 

The second image is also landscape format and seems to be a photograph of scarred or cut skin. Again, the top left corner has been blackly inked in. We are not sure what it is, but it feels intimate: the artist talks about what her skin looks like after a surgical brace has been removed, and we wince at the marks the orthotic has left behind. Is this real, or is it synthetic, using the oilcloth which has been used in hospitals since Soviet times? Either way, it contains memories.

Soliloquy is black and white, shot in close up, shadowy with a black background. It is claustrophobic as we only see the hands and parts of a face in the shot. One hand holds a cigarette at first. Then the hands feel a piece of dark cloth. At times a part of the woman’s head comes into shot, the lips, the teeth, hands touching the face, or stroking a curl of hair. At other times it is just the hands moving, or stroking each other, covering the face, or the eye looking out. At one point the woman holds up a small rectangular mirror. The shots sometimes move out of focus. It is quite abstract.  

Grandpère’s Pear is digital, black and white, reshot from the artist’s father’s home movie in the 1940s. The film depicts a Dwoskin family get-together. The original footage is re-imagined through slow motion and close up and is very grainy, almost as if drawn in charcoal. The shots move to different people, closing in on their faces and then moving out again to give a sense of the gathering. At one point, a pear seems like a shiny, white, sparkling ball and the camera follows it around as the person holds it while talking and gesticulating. This movement fills the frame. There are many repetitions of people’s small movements, such as a head moving back and forth as someone speaks or looks, so it becomes both funny and poignant.

is (was) the length of last night

bit with breath-knots

while the figure of the fig

riffs on the orange blinds

and a fresh wash of cars

daubs over some dawn radio

I’m in sleep debt again

all a-womble

the bed bends

the tea’s on

twitter’s up

crinkling the sheet

that never fits

I’m further away from “then”

yes    I suppose    but somehow    no

nearer “now”

so let it soak in    then splash

more hot in the bucket

or (sigh) try a cold bath

–urgh

is it really a choice between

(i) victims, and (ii) vitamins?

do you need pics—or what?—

doesn’t mean it never happened

Bright flowers – red, pink, yellow, purple, white. Overflowing leaves. Green stems underwater, fMRIs of Sherwood’s brain that look like flowers, or maybe flowers masquerading as fMRIs. Fruit growing roots across a table. Grey metal tools that might be kitchen implements, or possibly medical instruments. A vase painted subdued blue and white, a contained scene of its own – a human inside a plant world. Peas in a pod, purple ball-like blossoms, yellow petals wilted – all fallen from vase to table.

These three paintings of Katherine Sherwood’s, part of her Brain Flower series, contain layers upon layers. Layers of colour. Layers of history as Sherwood works on the backside of 17th-century paintings and pays homage to women artists, including Maria van Oosterwyck and Giovanna Garzoni. Layers of meaning as she transforms medical
images into lush flowers and, in the case of Ham with Pewter, into a cut of meat.

These still life paintings, recentred from the 17th century, are in no way still or static. Ferment vibrates in Sherwood’s pieces. Her flowers, draping leaves and fruits are certainly pretty but also fecund, transitory, imperfect. At the core is a disability reclamation of cold, sterile medical images, which all too often doctors use to strengthen their authority over disabled and chronically ill people’s bodyminds. In creating bright fecund flowers – moments of beauty – from fMRIs of her brain, Sherwood’s reclamation joins, and further nuances, one of the major themes of disability arts and culture. She recentres her own medical data, transforming it into images of beautiful ferment stripped of medicine’s authority and meaning, ultimately claiming her own authority as a disabled woman artist.

These recentreings – of medical images, of women painters from the 1600s, of the backsides of old paintings – make the ferment of Sherwood’s flowers all the more vibrant.

science fiction is not pretend

A bleakness I am grateful for. A rage not repressed behind a friendly face. Tired upon tired of insisting “honest we’re not monsters”, here instead is “let’s get the monsters out then”.

Clip after clip of human-made disasters and ad-hoc lab experiments in varying degrees of grainy pixelation. Compiled in tab-like frames, they’re an assortment of aspect ratios which point to YouTube, or something filmed on a phone. This and other devices that we hold close to our bodies as windows onto these seedy underbelly existences. A bubbling mass in liquid. A tiny baby bird being fed with a syringe, mouth gaping open – sitting on a white pillowy thing on a desk in front of someone’s computer. Not very official.

Someone pointing at jars, giving prepper tips? A home-made cooking lesson with an enormous slab of meat. A lake burning – fire and a fat column of smoke billowing upwards. Black mould growing in a jar, someone pushing their foot on a bloated pocket of grass which ripples like there’s water under there. Yellow pills in a petri dish bubble and fizz and send flat slow lightning to each other, setting the next one off to continue the reaction. Pigs struggling to move in tiny cages, a mouth chewing (eiw), a tree on fire, a lake shrinking. Sciencey graphics with colourful spheres, a hand poking a pink soft thing, brown liquid in a dish grows coral-like formations upwards at its edges. The bird again, close-up. The video ends on its gaping mouth, directed at us like a silent shout, as the audio describes people walking by the narrator’s sick bed, protesting and sounding great (“Congrats.”)

And throughout, the distorted narrating voice, barely able to hold itself up under a heavy gravity, retains a power. A fury, not embodied in energetic violence, but seeping out, simmered and distilled.

access points // or // alternative states of matter(ing)

A series of six enormous disks set into green and patchy brown grassland, lined up just beyond a row of trees.

The scale is hard to grasp. They are planetary, atomic, astronomical, microscopic.

It would take perhaps thirty people standing in a circle around the edge, holding hands, to encircle one of them. These people would be able to look down on it: flat; suspended somewhere below their hips.

Up close, a perforated metallic colour. From above, a solid white. They are alien in the most alieney way, and familiar. Scientific and mythic. Each has at its centre a solid circle, expanded out into concentric rings – one, two, or three of them. These rings hold solid circles of their own, varying in number in each instance.

These are crop circles that, rather than imprints, look like they could hover and take back off to the sky they came from. Their presence generates uneasiness. I imagine if you got up close or under them, they’d hum.

In hope it finds you well and in Day Dream, Milda Januseviciute makes space for opacity and intimacy. Investigating healing, hope, resilience and embodiment, her films attend intimately to a body in and out of place.

hope it finds you well finds wounding in a site of healing – an ayurvedic clinic in Puttaparthi, India. There is confinement and waiting: hands illuminated by a torch attempt unsuccessfully to break a padlock with a metal file; an outdoor conservatory’s complex latticework resembles a cage. Illness-time manifests in a pink apartment where incense rises from a corner, and a wall-hanging of the Buddha wafts gently. A woman’s voiceover croons, recites extracts from Sylvia Plath’s poem Tulips. In horizontal split-screen a man’s head, torso, prescribes medicinal ghee to a patient – me? From a distance, men and women thresh reeds, while yellow captions reveal the relationships between hope (a bond of trust between patient and practitioner) and resilience (the capacity to re-form under conditions of uncertainty). 

Day Dream‘s femme-presenting protagonist performs a role-ritual triad. Dressed in voile and flowering plants she stumbles through a sloping forest. Along the trunk of a fallen tree leading out to a lake she falters, slips, leaps, grabbing a rope that holds her, while skin and voile and plants meet, cocooned in the water’s green embrace. Dressed in white and silver, she is cast in an empty overgrown arena, dancing with her dreams. In a frayed waffle robe she performs backstage, front of house, in a huge unfinished theatre warehouse. She recites lines, laughs, smokes, responds to an invisible audience – like other women who have taken to creative endeavours to invent their own lives. I am apart from her here, watching her from outside. Her skin is no longer against mine, in the opacity of a final starburst.

i.

‘radda

noun

layer, stratum

line, row, course

the work of a day’

is written to the right of it: oyster in pastel, corrugated light, grit coagulated, layers are cells that fold over and inwards when under threat, world-hardened sediment of nerve compression, the work of a day is a weight held in situ, in organs, the holy carapace of it, the callous of a day, the corporeal kept in ethereal purples, the bruises turned boils, the delicate asteroids bone-deep and resting, each day a new luminescence and density, mollusk shell of memories condensed mineralic, my stone-clam of all-felt, our talisman of innards cramped iridescent into holy artefact.

ii.

is written, in a mind, underneath it: two strips of sand and a band-aid on one, a sock illustrated on the other; a plaster is also a stripping you bare of assumptions that you are invulnerable, and the world may see your precise place now of attempting-to-heal, the shuffle in socks as a low-to-the-ground grade of ambient sound in witness to the quiet, the beige, the lilac, lighter tones, the gravelliness of continuous path, the persistence of living, the parallels between modes of covering oneself in softness with hopes of protection; the deepest protection is softest to skin, a light band of fabric across your body and the whisper of a desert dune comprised of infinitesimal grains of bearing it.