SNAP!

Last year I posted about the Mencap SNAP photography competition. Since then as part of my old job I have been working with a group of people to organise activities to raise awareness and promote the equal rights of people with learning disabilities in Stoke-on-Trent.

We have arranged to borrow the exhibition of the 2006 SNAP winners photographs. They are currently on show at Keele University. On Monday I will go and collect them and take them to 3 venues in the city - Burslem School of Art, Staffordshire University and The Observatory clubhouse. They will be there until mid April.

The press release is accompanied by a feedback form, designed by other group members, to encourage viewers to think about the impact of the images. I can tell you what I think of them.....

The photos place people with learning disabilities in the public eye - as people with value and dignity.

I have some reservations about some of the photos - well not so much the photos as the words that go with some of them. It is obvious that some of the words although written as though they are the words of the person with a learning disability, are actually the words of a carer/ supporter. I find this very patronising and disempowering. I wonder if someone does not speak, it is not better to have no words with the photo?

There is also a wider point about the photographs - if I cannot take my own photo and cannot tell you what I want a photograph taking of, or do not like my photo begin taken, then I cannot not take part in the competition. Not everyone can/ wants to take photos. I don’t think it is "equality" to pretend that everyone can do that - we are all different. I wonder if there is a debate here?

I am going to link the exhibition in with diversity month at Staffs Uni and set up a discussion event sometime in the next few weeks, to pick up some of these issues.

feminist theatre......

in North Staffordshire.

The Vagina Monologues and Oleanna are coming to town.

The Vagina Monologues is for one night only, the Oleanna is on for 2 weeks.

I have posted about both on froomblog.

The Vagina Monologues is very populist theatre and can fairly easily be seen as light entertainment, rather than feminist theatre. I saw it last year at the Regent Theatre in Stoke-on-Trent - the acting was rather poor on the whole. Although there are serious moments when the women on stage are telling stories of other women's experiences of rape, sexual violence and oppression, it's the comedy that stands out, and turns it into a "show". I think that's where the message is lost along the way. We need light relief, of course, but, for example, the section of the show where one woman talks about her cunt, was played just for laughs and missed the point.

Oleanna is totally serious playwriting and is challenging for the audience. When I saw it a few years ago it really made me think about gender roles, power, politics, education and other things too. It's being put on at the New Victoria Theatre, a repertory theatre-in-the-round, which is great as they hardly ever stage straight political drama. This season marks the change over from one director to another at the theatre - both women, so I hope this is the start of a new, more political era for them, more like it was when the theatre was the Old Vic in it's old venue.

IRIS

Iris is the Research centre within the Faculty of Arts, Media and Design at Staffordshire University with a focus on:

• the initiation of conferencing, publishing, exhibiting and educational projects within the field of contemporary women’s’ photographic practice, and
• broadening access to the medium through books, exhibitions and educational activities.
  

Today was the launch of an exhibition curated by IRIS called Masquerade, at the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery. Masquerade brings together the work of 7 women photographers from Britain and the USA, and features all kinds of contemporary portraits. The show also compares photographs in Masquerade with paintings from the Museum's collections.

The show has already been in London and Birmingham. It is heartening to see an exhibition of national significance led by Staffordshire/ Stoke-on-Trent women and organisations.

There are some challenging pieces - one artist photographed her mother in her last months with Alzheimer's. The 6 portraits of women with moustaches are truly beautiful. Apparently when the exhibition was in the MAC in Brimingham there were complaints about these portraits including "disgusting". Why do openly hairy women offend people so much?

Masquerade is on until the 9th July. Get there if you can.

identity and conformism

I have read in the grauniad that a government advisor thinks that mental distress is more of a social problem than poverty or unemployment - seems odd he doesn't link them together! And of course it's a problem when the inequalities are so great. And when the prejudice against mental illness is so dramatic. We are taught to fear it and that means we behave in ways that inhibit our self-expression. We conform. And that makes us ill. We are all mad, it's when we keep our personality constrained and our distress withheld that we get ill. Seems so obvious to me.

My identity is something I have been thinking about a lot in recent days - especially since seeing Frida Kahlo's work and the sculpture of Alison Lapper. It seems necessary to keep myself safe, that I have at least 2 main identities. One at work and one at home/ with friends. There are many things I would like to say and do at work that I believe would alienate me from the organisation and most (not all) of my colleagues. Not least I feel compelled to pretend I am well when I am not.

I realised yesterday that I need to find a job that matches my values more closely. I feel very constrained in the workplace currently. Mostly that is due to organisational culture. So - I'm looking for work in the voluntary sector again I think - to do with rights, inclusion, anti-poverty, anti-discrimination....... let me know if you see anything......

stunning art

Frida Kahlo was mind-boggling - there were so many pictures and so much information about them - almost too much to take in and I am knackered. I had no trouble relating to the pictures - they were so vibrant. Some were very small and it was very busy so getting close enough was difficult sometimes.

She painted a lot of still lives and portraits of other people - one in particular that interested me was of a horticulturalist like a tree growing out of a decaying corpse. The many themes expressing duality were expressed in most of her paintings - life and death, dark and light, sun and moon. Fertility was significant for her too and paintings explicity depicting her miscarriage are moving in their honesty.

There were many books and postcards on offer in the Tate Modern shop - some were of incredibly beautiful photographic portraits of Frida brilliantly executed. Self-portraits in paint and photos by others were very important to Frida. I talked a lot with the friend I went with about identity and how we present ourselves to the world compared to how we wish to be seen and how others see us.
After visting the Kahlo exhibition we went to see the wonderful sculpture of Alison Lapper pregnant, on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. It was stunning and contrasted wonderfully well with the phallic Nelson's Column. The three "great men" would be nothing without their mothers after all.

Alison has written an autobiography part of which was in the Observer a few weeks ago - it is very disturbing. I also find it distrubing that Alison struggles to sell her own work as an artist - she was interviewed on TV in relation to the fourth plinth statue. Marc Quinn who designed the sculpture is famous and earning large amounts from his art - which includes Alison as one of his subjects. Alison's work was described as disgusting /ugly, as was her sculpture of her by Brian Sewell amongst others.

Yesterday I read an Independent article by Deborah Orr on the train on my way back from London. She challenges us to celebrate giving birth to children with impairments as we celebrate the sculpture's beauty.

So how do we judge beauty then? Does it have to be classical (as the statue clearly is - it's like the Venus de Milo)? How do we get ourselves to see difference as beautiful? Self-portraits were used by Frida and are also used by Alison to explore their own ideas of beauty and identity - and these can be shared by us - they certainly made me thing about my own views of myself and how I see others.

Alison Lapper

I watched a programme on TV a couple of weeks ago about an amazing woman - Alison Lapper. She is an artist and campaigner for civil rights for disabled people. She is a single parent. And she is the model for the fourth plinth - the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square - the statue has been designed by Marc Quinn.

This statue is so beautiful - I am so impressed that it was the chosen design for such a prominent site in London - maybe things are changing ........


Alison Lapper - fourth plinth

Frida

Isn't Frida Kahlo amazing?
Her work is being exhibited from 9th June to 9th October this year at the Tate Modern in London - find out more here.
See some more pictures here.


Self portrait

Learning Disability awareness week

It is learning disability awareness week soon (20-25 June).

Mencap - the UK's leading learning disability charity ran a photography competition called Snap!. The winners for 2005 are exhibited here. They will be on show at the Link Gallery in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London from the 18 June to 1 August.


"Sparkle" Kayleigh Dawson

Story behind the picture -
Because of my autistic spectrum disorder I think I can see the world differently to others around me. Small fragments of my world sometimes seem very important to me and I notice things that other people may not!I am very sensitive to things like touch and flickering lights! I always notice earrings my support worker wears and if she looks different in a slight way.I have taken photos of close-up objects in my school environment, which I see, mostly everyday.I took this photograph because I liked the sparkle of the water from the tap.