The words that are key to my approach to this project were written by the The Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation back before I was injured. Here they are.
Impairment: lacking part or all of a limb, or having a defective limb, organ or mechanism of the body.
Disability: the disadvantage or restriction of activity caused by a contemporary social organisation which takes little or no account of people who have physical impairments and thus excludes them from participation in the mainstream of social activities.
(The Union of The Physically Impaired Against Segregation, 1975)
These definitions define the way I see and interpret my experience of impairment and disability and so need to be included in any body of work I produce. So I played with creating them as an image. Firstly on their own and then I used the Disability Discrimination Act legislation to give the definition some context about my time and place.
I used the, now defunct Disability Discrimination act as the pictorial reference rather than the Equalities Act 2010 for two reasons: firstly it was the first piece of legislation that recognised the social model of disability and as such was a defining act in terms of the history of disabled people and political activism in the UK; and secondly because the words are wholly explicit and so work in terms of the image I wanted to create. Below are the results.
Thoughts
I think this approach – words as pictures – works better than me creating notes to go alongside my images and the processing treatment just helps contrast the statements. However I continued to experiment and came up with this last image that includes a reference to the 2005 act. It doesn’t need to be present in terms of content but does add the the image’s form.
anomiepete 