access denied! How accessible is the arts?
Words by Winnie Temple, in conversation with Luca Axley.
What kind of access barriers have you found within the arts and society itself?
“I’m a wheelchair user... accessing various things within the arts is really difficult.” “Nowhere in the world is really designed for wheelchair users, even the new builds... there are some accessibility features but it’s the fine details and it comes back to ‘nothing about us without us.’ Genuinely no one can have accessibility without consulting a disabled person that is actually using it.”
Could you explain your disability in your own words?
“I don’t publish my disability out there. The reason is because when I put a label to something I find that I’m reduced down to that, I think people should be taking the disabled experience as it is without labels.”
Do you think access barriers are lessening?
“It’s difficult because as I grow up as a person I’m looking at other things that I just didn’t see. So in a way, no... but I am seeing some attitude shifts... although I am still constantly surrounded by access barriers so I can’t be too optimistic.”
What was the inspiration behind your campaign?
“In terms of the poses, a lot of the emotions were… frustration that something so simple is so difficult to access, which is the whole inaccessibility within the arts, and like I just have to go that extra mile to be able to access something that other people just don’t have to think about. The inspiration behind the poses where I’m holding, say a paintbrush, that’s connected to my art practice.” “It was a lot to do with art, and the playing on scale with those tools has a lot to do with the access barriers... because I would not be able to hold a massive ink roller because of my arm weakness.” “Most recently, I’ve really been enjoying combining typography and portraiture and just like the wider scene, so I thought that like a paintbrush or a paint roller would be really nice and interactive. So at the moment we’re pretending that the paint roller has written all these letters. It all just connects in little ways.”
“The colour scheme of the shoot was very much inspired by the outfit that May designed for me… the whole collaboration on an adaptive fashion outfit… within that outfit the colour scheme was very much like purples, yellows, orange and that came from me loving clashing colours. At the time my hair was purple and I was kind of in a bit of a purple zone, so we went with yellow and orange to complement that even though they’re the opposites. The theme of that outfit was very much disabled joy with disability advocacy themes, so ‘nothing about us without us’ was written on the front of the jumper. I do a lot of disability advocacy in my day to day life, obviously that includes me just getting around…my disability advocacy also expands to the wider picture… it definitely applies to more systemic change.”
