It’s wonderful to be to talk about my journey, to talk about the wheelchair and the freedom it has bought me.
I started using a wheelchair 16 years ago 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 slip away and become restricted. It was like having an enormous new toy. I could whiz around and feel the wind in my again. Just being out on the street was exhilarating.
But even I had this newfound joy and freedom, people’s reaction completely changed towards me. It was as if they couldn’t see me anymore, as if an invisibility cloak had descended. They to see me in terms of their assumptions of what it must be like to be in a wheelchair. When I asked their associations with the wheelchair, they used words like “limitation,” “fear,” “pity” “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 seeing 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 to make my own stories about this experience, new narratives reclaim my identity.
[“Finding Freedom: ‘By creating our own stories we learn to take the texts our lives as seriously as we do ‘official’ narratives.’ — Davis 2009, TEDx Women”]
I started making work that aimed to communicate something of the joy and freedom I felt using a wheelchair — a power chair — to negotiate the world. I was to transform these internalized responses, to transform the preconceptions that had so my identity when I started using a wheelchair, by creating unexpected images. The wheelchair became object to paint and play with. When I literally started leaving traces of my joy and freedom, it was exciting to see the interested and surprised responses from people. It seemed to open new perspectives, and therein lay the paradigm shift. It showed that an 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 way as a wheelchair does, but the associations attached to scuba gear are ones of excitement and adventure, completely different to people’s responses to the wheelchair.
So I thought, “I wonder what’ll happen if I put the two together?” (Laughter) (Applause) the underwater wheelchair that has resulted has taken me on the amazing journey over the last seven years.
So to give 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 me on.
(Music)
(Applause)
It is the most amazing experience, beyond most other 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 say 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 for, or so transcends the frames of reference they with the wheelchair, they have to think in 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 means that they’re seeing the value of difference, the joy it brings when of focusing on loss or limitation, we see and discover the power and joy of seeing the world from exciting new perspectives. me, the wheelchair becomes a vehicle for transformation. In fact, I now call the underwater wheelchair “Portal,” because it’s literally pushed me through into a new way of being, into new dimensions and into a new level consciousness.
And the other thing is, that because nobody’s seen or of an underwater wheelchair before, and creating this spectacle is about creating new ways of seeing, being and knowing, now you have this concept in your mind. You’re all part of the artwork too.