It’s wonderful to be here to talk about my journey, to talk about the wheelchair and the freedom it has bought me.
I started using a wheelchair 16 years when an extended illness changed the way I could access the world. When I started using the wheelchair, it was a tremendous new freedom. I’d seen my life away and become restricted. It was like having an enormous new toy. I could whiz around and feel the wind in my face again. Just being out on the street was exhilarating.
But even though I had this newfound joy and freedom, people’s completely changed towards me. It was as if they couldn’t see me anymore, as if an invisibility cloak had descended. They seemed to see me in terms of their of what it must be like to be in a wheelchair. When I asked people their associations with the wheelchair, they used words like “limitation,” “fear,” “pity” and “restriction.” I realized I’d internalized these responses and it had changed I was on a core level. A part of me had become alienated from myself. I was myself not from my perspective, but vividly and continuously from the perspective of other people’s responses to me.
As a result, I knew I needed to make my own stories about this experience, narratives to reclaim my identity.
[“Finding Freedom: ‘By creating our own stories we learn to take the texts of our lives as seriously as we do ‘official’ narratives.’ — Davis 2009, TEDx Women”]
I started making work that aimed to communicate something of joy and freedom I felt when using a wheelchair — a power chair — to the world. I was working to transform these internalized responses, to transform the preconceptions that had so shaped my identity I started using a wheelchair, by creating unexpected images. The wheelchair became an object to paint and play with. When I literally started leaving traces of my joy and freedom, it was exciting to the interested and surprised responses from people. It seemed to open up new perspectives, and therein lay the paradigm shift. It showed that arts practice can remake one’s identity and transform preconceptions by revisioning the familiar.
So when I began to dive, in 2005, I realized scuba gear extends your range of activity in just the same way as wheelchair does, but the associations attached to scuba gear are ones of excitement and adventure, completely different people’s responses to the wheelchair.
So I thought, “I wonder what’ll happen if I put the together?” (Laughter) (Applause) And the underwater wheelchair that has resulted has taken me on the most amazing journey over the last seven years.
So to you an idea of what that’s like, I’d like to share you one of the outcomes from creating this spectacle, and show you what an amazing journey it’s taken on.
(Music)
(Applause)
It is the most amazing experience, beyond most other things I’ve experienced in life. I literally have the freedom to move in 360 of space and an ecstatic experience of joy and freedom.
And the incredibly unexpected thing that other people seem to see and feel that too. Their eyes literally light up, and they things like, “I want one of those,” or, “If you can do that, I can do anything.”
And I’m thinking, it’s because in moment of them seeing an object they have no frame of reference for, or so transcends the frames of reference they have with the wheelchair, they have to think a completely new way. And I think that moment of completely thought perhaps creates a freedom that spreads to the rest of other people’s lives. For me, this that they’re seeing the value of difference, the joy it brings when instead of focusing on loss or limitation, we and discover the power and joy of seeing the world from exciting new perspectives. For me, the wheelchair becomes a vehicle for transformation. In fact, I now call the underwater wheelchair “Portal,” because it’s pushed me through into a new way of being, into new dimensions and into new level of consciousness.
And the other thing is, that because nobody’s seen or heard of an wheelchair before, and creating this spectacle is about creating new ways of seeing, being and knowing, now have this concept in your mind. You’re all part of the artwork too.