During the summer months, I was contacted by a local artist named: Christopher Samuel.
Christopher is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practise is rooted in identity and disability politics, much of which echoes his own lived experience. Interrogating his personal understanding of identity as a disabled person impacted by inequality and marginalisation, he responds with urgency, humour and poetic subversiveness throughout his work making it accessible to a wider audience of whom some can identify and relate to.
He explained how he and another artist Sophie Hoyle had been commissioned by Radar to create new work as part of 'Gendered re-presentations of disability, Equality, empowerment and marginalisation in Paralympic media' and that he wanted ME to assist in making his idea/brief come to life. He noted that the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project led by Emma Pullen, Lecturer in Sport Management in Loughborough University's School of Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences.
The project uses an intersectional approach to interrogate the dominance of particular kinds of disabled bodies (white, physically athletic, technologically enhanced) in Paralympic media cultures; and seeks to generate new insights into re-representations of gendered, raced and queer disabled subjectivities.
On Thursday 15th of September, the exhibition was launched with a fantastic turnout, and I can honestly say I have never been prouder to see my imagery in an A0 print formats for all to see.
Congratulations to all those involved!