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 ago when an extended illness changed the 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. 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 reaction completely changed 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 it must be like to be in a wheelchair. When I asked people their associations with the wheelchair, they used like “limitation,” “fear,” “pity” and “restriction.” I realized I’d internalized these responses and it had changed who I was on a core level. A part of me become alienated from myself. I was seeing myself not from my perspective, but vividly and continuously 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 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.’ — 2009, TEDx Women”]
I started making work that aimed to communicate of the joy and freedom I felt when using wheelchair — a power chair — to negotiate the world. I was working to transform these internalized responses, to transform the preconceptions that had so shaped my identity when 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 see the interested and surprised responses from people. It seemed to open up new perspectives, and lay the paradigm shift. It showed that an arts practice can one’s identity and transform preconceptions by revisioning the familiar.
So when began to dive, in 2005, I realized scuba gear extends your range of activity in just the same 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) And the underwater that has resulted has taken me on the most amazing journey over the last years.
So to give you an idea of what that’s like, I’d like to share with you of the outcomes from creating this spectacle, and show you an amazing journey it’s taken me 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 degrees of space an ecstatic experience of joy and freedom.
And the incredibly unexpected thing is that other people seem to see and 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 that moment of them seeing object they have no frame of reference for, or so transcends the frames 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 to the rest of other people’s lives. For me, this means that they’re seeing the value of difference, the joy brings when instead of focusing on loss or limitation, we see and discover the power and joy of seeing world from exciting new perspectives. For me, the wheelchair becomes a vehicle 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 nobody’s seen or heard 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 part of the artwork too.