It’s wonderful to be here to talk about my journey, to about the wheelchair and the freedom it has bought me.
I started using a wheelchair 16 years ago an extended illness changed the way I could access the world. When I using the wheelchair, it was a tremendous new freedom. I’d seen my life slip and become restricted. It was like having an enormous new toy. I could whiz and feel the wind in my face again. Just being out on the street was exhilarating.
But even though I had newfound joy and freedom, people’s reaction completely changed towards me. It was if they couldn’t see me anymore, as if an invisibility cloak had descended. They seemed to see me in terms of their assumptions of what it must be like to be in a wheelchair. When I asked people their associations the wheelchair, they used words like “limitation,” “fear,” “pity” and “restriction.” I realized I’d internalized these responses and it changed who 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 needed to make my own stories about this experience, new 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 aimed to communicate something of the joy and freedom I felt when using a wheelchair — a chair — to negotiate the world. I was working to transform these internalized responses, to transform the preconceptions that had so my identity when I started using a wheelchair, by creating 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 see the interested and surprised responses from people. It seemed to open up new perspectives, and therein lay the paradigm shift. It showed that an arts practice can remake one’s identity and transform preconceptions by revisioning familiar.
So when I began to dive, in 2005, I realized scuba gear extends your range of in just the same way as a wheelchair does, but the associations attached to scuba gear are ones of 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 most amazing journey over the last seven years.
So to give you idea of what that’s like, I’d like to share with 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 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 is that other people seem see and feel that too. Their eyes literally light up, and they things like, “I want one of those,” or, “If can do that, I can do anything.”
And I’m thinking, it’s because that moment of them seeing an object they have no frame of reference for, or so transcends frames of reference they have with the wheelchair, they have to think in a completely new way. And I think that moment of completely new 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, joy it brings when instead of focusing on loss or limitation, see and discover the power and joy of seeing the world from exciting new perspectives. For me, the wheelchair becomes 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 of consciousness.
And the other thing is, that because nobody’s seen or heard of an underwater wheelchair before, and creating this is about creating new ways of seeing, being and knowing, now you have this concept in your mind. You’re part of the artwork too.