Warren MacKenzie Advancement Award Report
2024
EXPLORING THE DISABLED BODY ON DISPLAY
After traveling to the Mutter Museum, I still felt uneasy. I grew infuriated with the encapsulation of disabled bodies. This experience was the impetus for conceptualizing disabled bodies as bountiful, overflowing, and uncontained. The history of disabled bodies enclosed in glass jars motivates my practice to break away from this oppressive history and reimagine disability in glass and ceramics in new ways. This is one of the many ways that crip materiality shows up in my work. I started wondering what disabled approaches to material looked like. I started wondering what disabled spaces looked like.
The piece Uncontained, 2024, came out of this travel opportunity. It is created with porcelain, glass, steel cable and hardware, found medical tubing, and water. The piece features a person who has a disability that requires regular infusions. The IV bag deconstructed provided the opportunity to utilize movement within the work, water flowing from the glass IV bag to the needle, and dripping into the porcelain arm. The arm became a vessel, containing water, while also slowly dripping at the bottom. Multiple parts of this piece show the perspective of the disabled body uncontained, completely opposing the historical view that the Mutter Museum showcases. From this trip, I am hoping to plan more medical museum trips for the future to keep studying the spaces and the way they discuss bodies.
I am continuing a long ongoing series featuring people with disabilities, giving over more control for how their piece is displayed and how they are represented. This project is called Imagining Our Stories Told by Us: Creating an Archive of Disability. I already have received more than 10 requests to be included just in Madison, WI.
The Warren MacKenzie Advancement Award has helped me conceptualize and challenge my work in many new ways. I am so grateful for the chance to travel to this amazing museum, sparking my interest in many others around the U.S. I am excited by the research behind it and the rich disability theory that I am starting to create from it.
Uncontained, 2024