Call for Submissions: ‘My Life’ – Shape Open

I found this call for submissions on the web and some of my work would fit well.

“This year’s Shape Open invites artists to explore the theme ‘my life’ in relation to disability.”

It’s an open call so anyone can apply and the constraints are for me – 2D work no bigger that 100cm height x 120cm width, ready to hang.

I think my exhibit for the Interim show directly addresses the issue and so have submitted the images I presented for that. I also don’t feel that any of my MA work is really ready for exhibiting other than the first year exhibit. This is because I don’t think I have created all the images I need to create a body of work and so the things I want to say that are not yet fully formed.

Here, below is the image and accompanying submission statement

Statement explaining how your work fits the theme ‘My Life’

My Health, My Home, Your Rules is a visual statement that identifies three fundamental things that impose on my experience.

The first image makes a statement about my health and how it changes. Because I am paralysed I often have to use external indicators to assess my health and one good indicator is the colour of my urine. Thus this image indicates my health for a week. The second image – a triptych – reflects that a lot of my life is spent in the domestic sphere working to daily routines. This hints at both the maintenance tasks involved in dealing with paralysis and some of the ways I seek to spend my time. The third image offers a rather traditional landscape view while noting how society defines wheelchair users as a special class of person with rules that only pertain to us.

I did not create these images for this exhibit. I use art as a way engaging with, and making sense of, the world around me, as the process of creating representations of my experience helps me deal emotionally with, and to respond to, the pressures of life – whether or not they are originate from physiological, social or physical sources.

Using aesthetics to re-present my experience shines lights on things normally hidden and questions that which is often seen as natural and so releases a pressure while inviting others to think about, and question, my experience as a disabled person.

Now it’s just of case of waiting.

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