Being sick with COVID kinda ended up being the perfect time to explore the thing I’m doing for Videotage – having a go at creating an intervention for their Leave Your Body realm in Minecraft.

I’ve been struggling with falling asleep for more than a year, and whenever I get sick I secretly hope that falling asleep will become easy at least for a while – it never does. So feeling poorly, unable to sleep and very bored, I tried my first build.

I never played Minecraft before, it took me a couple of tries and a couple of random YouTube tutorials to get the hang of the most basic things.

The game was fun and quite calming, it required the perfect level of engagement and effort for somebody lying sick in bed. I loved doing a bit of math to figure out the scale of what I wanted to do, and then thoroughly enjoyed the repetition of placing a block after block next to each other. it drew me in. Tiny repetitive tasks can be a source of calm to neurodivergent bodies.

I don’t know if Videotage had things like disability and dissociation in mind when they named the project Leave Your Body, but being disabled, we get a lot of reasons to want to leave our bodies so it all really connects for me.

I decided to recreate my bedside table but massive like a tall building. The bedside table was nearby, quite pleasant in shape, basically contained my life in it, and maybe by now, it is an established subject matter in Disability Arts iconography?

As with the current semi-lock down in Hong Kong, just as in most other lock downs, people develop an inexplicable bubbling primal urge for greenery and sunlight. So this last weekend my partner and I took our poodle to do a short hike on Hong Kong’s outlying Lamma Island.

Although I had seen it before, I somehow completely forgot about this sizeable man-made hole in the hillside along the hiking route, that dated back to the Japanese occupation (1941 – 1945). It is said that this cave was used to hide boats ladened with explosives that would have been launched into unsuspecting enemy ships. There is a small stainless steel plaque near the cave describing it as a “kamikaze grotto” along with some information. However, I have found some speculation on if the caves were ever in use or if the boats and their operators were intended to be sacrificial.

In thinking about the city’s relationship with the subterranean this instance is unique in that it supports a larger historical narrative and also takes on the significance of a landmark. What is essentially an empty hole, contains within it so much thick tension through the power of absence. Somehow it manages to be a very “heavy hole”

To assist in thinking about this I found this quote from Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane:

“We all carry trace fossils within us – the marks that the dead and the missed leave behind. Handwriting on an envelope; the wear on a wooden step left by footfall; the memory of a familiar gesture by someone gone, repeated so often it has worn its own groove in both air and mind: these are trace fossils too. Sometimes, in fact, all that is left behind by loss is trace – and sometimes empty volume can be easier to hold in the heart than presence itself.”

Hello, I am Jess Starns and here is a bit about my studio. My creative process is participatory, collaborative, and inclusive with a focus on social history (mostly Brighton’s history), disability and neurodiversity. It is also multidisciplinary, with materials and approach informed by the theme of the project. I am always interested in learning about new tools to create art that I find accessible and can use to collaborate with others. I like creating art with others that doesn’t feel like you are creating art.

I studied the Inclusive Arts Practice MA at the University of Brighton and this has had a big impact on my practice. Some of my biggest influencers are the Hove cinematographers, Sister Corita Kent and Lee Miller. I enjoy darkroom printing and even though it’s not a huge part of my practice currently, I have been doing so since I was about four years old.

During the residency I am looking forward to developing my creative practice and finding new ways of working whilst exploring the residency theme ‘environmentalism’.  Please free to look around my studio, and send me a message in the comments section below. Enjoy
looking around! Jess.

Hi

Today is the first day of my residency with Vital Capacities and Both Sides Now. So I thought I’d post some pictures of soil – for things to grow. I said it before but when the virtual studio’s layout doesn’t remind me of Tumblr themes, it reminds me of a garden patch.

Devil’s dykes’ past performer Rosa Farber explained to me that the soil on their family’s vegetable farm is a very very special kind. It is rich in all those minerals that I can’t recall but that sounded important, making that soil a sort of miracle. I know very little but I could sense its power. I am holding the image of the soil’s rich heavy potency in my mind.

Below are two photos of the actual soil, and my first proper attempt at recording an audio description. Digging your fingers in the soil you can find nearby is a valid and great alternative to my rambling.

somehow

the chair was never an obstacle

instead

it was a way of breaking the ice

many friendships that grew

in that little cul-de-sac

from movie nights

to girls playing with their skipping ropes

always complaining about who should do the skipping

without me minding

that I couldn’t do the jumping

these conversations

and games happened so organically

with ease, no one ever made a fuss

about the chair

(other than the times they fought to play in it)

we would play, just get on with things

with and without the chair One of the all-time faves was Hide and Seek.

I grew up in a community where everyone

knew each other.  For the first 6 years of my life

I was an only child, living with both parents

and the only friends I had and knew

were the ones from school

and cousins.

At the age of 7

we moved to a new home

still in the same area

everyone who moved into the new community

around the same time

none of the homes had fencing

yet most days, I’d spend in the house

and occasionally on the outside kitchen porch

with the kitchen door wide open and mum always busy cooking up something nice

I’ve never known what it means to be bound

bound to this chair, if anything

 it’s given me the most incredible ability

the ability to move, the ability to live life,

the ability to experience the world.

When I think of my chair I think

of all the incredible things

I’ve been able to do with it, as a result of it.  

when going places, or viewing apartments

over the years, I have never mentioned before the time

that I use a wheelchair:

I somehow always forget

to mention it feeling it to be unimportant.

The scared and shocked faces!

Most close friends now joke about, and say

‘dude did you tell them you’re coming with an extra?’

At times when going out, everyone would

get into the car and ask

‘What are we waiting for?’ and I’d say

‘For one of you to put the chair in the boot!’

In my childhood,

I felt safe, with my chair

and my environment

and people in my life

my family never allowing any self-pity

but that was in South Africa with its

imbalances, across race, culture, language,

disability is perhaps the most overlooked.

I only experienced discrimination

later in life, feeling the weight and smack

of discrimination hitting me

but I could withstand the blows

I remember the day –

16th of August –

one of my wheels came off.

Some screws came lose,

got lost and it fell off

as I was wheeling myself.

in that very moment

I burst out with laughter thinking

screw loose laughter, hilarious. Oh shit!

Yet somehow feeling safe and held,

having learned long ago how to handle

my chair, suddenly in that moment

conforming to society’s idea that I am stuck

and bound and cannot move around

which isn’t the case, when

I have my screws in place,

Which isn’t how I feel about my chair at all.   

My brakes who at times fail me

yet have always been in reach

when I need to stop

and be still. 

The handles, that have made it okay

for others to reach out and come up close

I have learnt that your presence

will always fill the rooms we enter

and that that is not

a bad thing.  I have learnt

that we are one and you are not the other. 

My wheels, gliding me

through wherever I need to be,

uneven roads, uphill, rough streets,

moving-me-keeping-me-moving.

my back rest has taught me

not to slouch, to sit up straight

upright n’ ready to face the world

with confidence; the hard and strong frame

that has carried me through time

on the lightest and heaviest of days.

Sometimes unaware of its strength,

I know it’s always there to rely on.

My seat that I gently slide over

and into each day

Sometimes unaware

of the support you give

As I slide over my body sinks into it,

the feeling of being held and ready –

I am ready to go do life. 

Through this residency I am exploring the connection to, and relationship with, my wheelchair and me moving in different spaces and what this has meant for me over the 29 years of using one.

I am interested in the different emotional phases I’ve gone through in using a wheelchair. How this has had an impact internally but also externally.

Dance has played a huge role in my independence, confidence and acceptance of self and others.  I want to explore motion in the studio, where I am more fluid and confident compared to outside spaces, revisiting my childhood games of hide and seek and when one of the kids would give me a piggy back so I could be part of the game with another pushing the chair, erasing the wheel tracks in the sand so no one could find us. 

This Vital Capacities commission is about exploring these different pathways, tapping into these trails and travails and experiences through film.

I think self-awareness and awareness of the chair and difference came at quite a later stage, and a lot of this had to do with society, and how disability is perceived in the world we live in and how people with disabilities get treated. So with the work I am thinking of putting together a 5 minute video of me moving in studio, exploring different connections, emotions and states of being I have experienced.