Taking The Pip, 2025
Comissioned by Shape Arts, for Rights, Cuts, Action!
This work brings together 25 portraits of disabled, neurodivergent, and mad people shot at their homes across West Yorkshire. Each subject holds a placard with messages of protest, resistance, fear, and hope. The series responds to a year charged with local and national direct action from disabled-led groups like Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC) and Crips Against Cuts, in opposition to welfare cuts and the assisted dying bill, and allied action for Palestine.
Direct action and protest often relies on the ability to disrupt public spaces, to make issues more visible, loud, and harder to ignore. For many disabled people though, inaccessible public space and transport, energy and mobility issues, and vulnerability to illness are just some of the barriers preventing them from taking to the streets. Coupled with the fact that most disabilities are invisible, disabled liberation is threatened by the importance of ‘visibility’ in achieving recognition, solidarity, and change.
Each portrait, placard, and accompanying audio description in this work was crafted collaboratively between myself and sitter. Many of the sitters are artists themselves, community workers, parents, and members of their own support networks. Some both need and provide care work, supporting and employing other disabled people. This process grants sitters both visibility and agency over their own image.
The portraits also fight back against harmful stereotypes of disabled people which are rife in mainstream media, where their scapegoating as ‘fraudulent benefit claimers’ mirrors the way other minorities are presented as the root of social and economic problems. These parallels remind us that disabled liberation is bound up with liberation for all - the systems we fight are the same. In the ways disabled people resist, care for one another, and imagine futures beyond productivity, there is something vital for everyone to learn.
Audio descriptions & BSL available on the link below: