Tracing, placing, plotting;

Link Up Arts

http://www.salisburyartscentre.co.uk/resident-companies/link-up-arts.aspx

Salisbury Arts Centre Exterior

AIMS & OBJECTIVES

The group works to the principles of Disability Arts Practice which include:
Being controlled by disabled people
Shaping the culture of disabled people
Expressing the voice of creative people
Empowering people

The objectives of Link Up Arts are:

To provide an informal support network for disabled artists in Salisbury and South Wiltshire
To create opportunities for artists’ development, mentoring and training
To encourage disabled artists to be more active and involved
To share / disseminate information about Disability Arts, arts & disability, and other related events and opportunities via a newsletter (minimum 6 p.a.) and via the web page to interested artists, participants and audiences.
To undertake occasional visits to arts events further afield (self-funded)
To work with Salisbury Arts Centre on its programming of disabled artists and Disability Arts.
To work with Salisbury Arts Centre to encourage greater acceptability of disability artists by mainstream audiences.
To work with Salisbury Arts Centre to promote higher profile events such as a festival/ celebration of disabled artists and Disability Artsif and when capacity and resources allow.

LUA works in partnership with Salisbury Arts Centre, where it is based, to achieve these objectives.

Gini Churchill

I met Gini Churchill (the lead artist), Bob and Bunty in a studio space, upstairs at Salisbury Arts Centre – a converted church – where they were meeting to print some images. They often meet in the café area of the Arts Centre and discuss their art. The Arts Centre is their base and provides the group with organizational support.

Gini: We need to make it clear that we’re about artists. I’m not trained as a therapist or a teacher or anything like that. I’m an artist. I function as an artist and this is about getting together with other artists.

Gus: You’re a Disability Arts group?

Gini: LUA was actually founded and funded by Salisbury District Council to promote Disability Arts specifically, so that is always part of our remit. And I consider myself an artist who makes Disability Art, that’s the whole point of what I do. I’ve always done work that was issue based. Before I had a visible enough disability (before the need to sit in a wheel chair), I was doing stuff about the environment and that kind of thing.

Now my work is about disability. It’s a way of enabling non-disabled people to see the kind of life that disabled people have to lead. It gives them an insight.

Bunty: It links up also for people with any form of disability whose main focus is art.

Gini: Absolutely. It’s about the art, it’s not about the disability. But there’s no amount of legislation they can make that will change people’s attitudes. Legislation will make people follow rules and regulations, but it won’t affect their attitudes. And you need to address that by involving them emotionally. They need ways of seeing into the kind of life disabled people lead. And that you can do through art.

Bunty: Actually it was insulting at a workshop we took part in recently, because I felt like I was in a reception class, being told to cut things out, and it didn’t matter if nothing matched anything else. It was almost as if we were being grouped as people less able, because

there were obviously disabled people amongst us. It was a very odd sensation, like less was expected of us artistically, because some of us have visible disabilities.

Bob: People with a visible disability are presumed to be less able aren’t they?

Bunty: They’re presumed to have less brain up here! Your brain’s missing because your legs don’t work.

It’s like when I was at junior school, a long time ago, they had all abilities in school together, they didn’t have special needs teaching or anything, and the children who couldn’t cope were at the back of the class playing with raffia. That was just to keep them quiet and occupied; there were no classroom assistants to take them on at a slower pace. Excluded, while everyone else was learning their times tables.

Gus: So LUA - is the criterion for joining that you have to be disabled?

Gini: We all have disabilities of one sort or another. We’re not nit picky about it, we count things like osteoporosis – it affects people’s lifestyles so it’s a disability. Anything that still enables people to be self-motivating and creative. Because if they’re not self-motivating then we don’t have the facilities to cope with them.

Bob: However, there is this thing when we’re applying for funding about how we have to be all inclusive isn’t there?

Gini: No, not necessarily. The project we’re aiming to complete this time – Testing the Edges - we don’t have to include anyone else. This project acknowledges the fact that we’re all professional artists. And everyone else has got projects with fifty people involved, that’s where they’re getting their money. We’re saying we have six to eight artists.

In a normal statistical analysis the number of artists in a community is a small percentage, and disabled people a small percentage of that community, so the percentage of disabled artists in a disabled community is going to be very small – we’re not going to add up to big numbers.

Bunty: You have a large amount of disabled people who have no interest in doing anything artistic at all. But they may be deeply into something else. When I first came back to Salisbury I had my eyes opened to the enormous range of abilities among people with disabilities, many of whom are terribly able people in loads of ways, but for the fact that they are in a wheelchair or other problems… And the humour too is extraordinary among people. But I think you’ve got to really be involved with people with disabilities to even start to understand everything. I find it demeaning that people should even think that disabled people should be patronized in any way. They don’t want to be patronized; they want to be treated as equal people.

Gus: Are you aware of the social model and medical model?

Gini: We try not to go into all that.

Gus: So you’re not politicized?

Gini: I am.

Bunty: But that is not what this particular group is about, this is about having fun, doing artistic things, and ignoring the fact that people are in wheelchairs or, y’know… that is not the issue, the issue is art.

Gini: We have people involved with the group, like for example H, who paints landscapes, she’s a really good painter. You’d never look at it and think this is about Disability Arts, right? It’s just landscapes, and they’re good. But she does only have one leg. And she paints her landscapes always from her car, or near her car, at the side of the road, because she can’t get across country. So there is a way in which it is Disability Art. But it’s just not very obvious. And she’s totally apolitical about it.

Gus: Part of what I’m doing here is letting artists know what facilities are open to them – so how open are you to disabled artists joining your group?

Gini: We welcome any disabled artist, we really do. But we do want people who are self-motivated, and are really thinking of themselves as artists. We’re not judging them about whether they are or not, they have to just be convinced they are themselves.

Gus: And what can they expect from Link Up Arts?

Gini: Being part of Link Up Arts means that you contribute to it, so if you join and you would like to come and talk about your work, you’re welcome to do that. We have a newsletter people can receive and also contribute to. If people are able to do workshops and things, then they do that as well. Angie, being a writer, has given us some wonderful writing workshops. And I’ve done some things with the computer that have been successful! (Print just failed…)

Bunty: I would never have claimed to be an artist; I’ve always enjoyed making and creating things. I was a producer in television and I joined up with this group when I was persuaded that I had some ability. I’m a garden/landscape artist – I tend to use the garden as a way of expressing and creating. I’m certainly not a ‘fine’ artist in any way at all. But I love the creativity side. I wouldn’t want anybody to be put off joining because they thought their artwork wasn’t up to standard, there’s no test. You don’t have to have exhibited at the RA or anything, we just enjoy art and creating and creativity.

Gus: You’ve mentioned a lot of skills – writing, a past in television, digital…

Gini: Yes, I trained as a print maker. I did lithography on stone, and etching. But now I physically can’t cope with the stones, they’re massive and heavy. I’ve got stones that are poster sized, it’s ridiculous! I also have little ones that I could use, but I’ve scanned all my etching plates into the computer, and all my drawings and stuff, and I use them as the basis for various things. So I do digital.

Gus: Uh-huh.

Gin: I’m also a performance poet!

Gus. A performance poet? Oh, standing up and reading poems?

Gini: I don’t stand up!

Gus: Oh, yeah, I realized as I said it, sorry!

Gini: (Laughs) At the moment I’m playing around with putting my poetry into a form where it looks like a sort of texture from the computer. I’m messing around with it, it will look like some sort of piece of artwork, but it’s actually words. If you can be bothered and figure it out you can actually read what it says.

I’ve been working with the words for a long time. A couple of years ago I put them down on cloth, and when spread out it was very long, and I presented it in a crumpled heap on the floor so that people had to pick it up and trawl through it if they wanted to read it, I was very surprised that they did. To me, that was about accessibility.

SAC Interior includingSally Stanley's Family Portraits Installation

Gus: Concerning accessibility, this building seems very good?

Gini: It is good, yes. It had a complete makeover, about 4 years ago. The staff are all really good and helpful. We’re very lucky to be here, because it is our base.

Bunty: There aren’t many places that have an Arts Centre like this.

Gini: No. We work in partnership with the Arts Centre. And on the Arts Centre website there is a link to Link Up Arts, and our newsletter appears on there.

Bunty: …and we’re working with some other organisations aren’t we, towards a big installation…

Gini: Yes, in our capacity as partner of the Arts Centre we’re exploring partnerships with MotivArt http://www.motive-art.org/ and Dance Aware, and Sarum Orchestra. In our “Testing the Edges” project we are going to explore how the work of the various groups overlaps, how we can sustain delivery of Disability Arts and arts and disability, who our audiences are and how we are perceived by “mainstream” artists. The project will culminate in an installation, performances and debate in November 2009.

Keep an eye on www.salisburyartscentre.co.uk for further information.

.Gus: Do you have connections with any other groups?

Gini: Yes, we do. Kaleido are very much aware of who we are, and they are involved in this larger partnership thing that we’re setting up.

Bunty: Who are you working for?

Gus: I’ve been commissioned by Alias Arts…

Return to intro http://www.aliasarts.org/editorial1/DisabledLedArts.htm