Our latest exhibition includes new work by August’s resident artists Nadine Mckenzie, …kruse, Siphenathi Mayekiso and Rebekah Ubuntu. Each artist has produced work that resonates with the work they did throughout their residency, reflecting on memory, personal narratives, experience, and movement. See the exhibition from 30 September at 11am.
Laura Lulika is interviewed by Corridor8 about their recent virtual residency on Vital Capacities & their ‘Body Builder’ exhibition. Read the interview by clicking here.
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.
It’s very interesting, going back and visiting old work. I tend to be consumed by new work, absorbed in my making and thinking. When my practice focused on drawing, drawing was all I wanted to do. For a while, a walk without a walking drawing was a wasted walk. My excitement and enthusiasm for the drawings gripped my mind totally.
So re-visiting the process of making walking drawings for this residency I expected to have that same consuming interest, and at first I definitely was excited and enjoyed seeing the work that was produced. Then as the days went on the work became frustrating. I felt stuck and I felt like I had gone backwards in some way. My focus has changed, my work is currently engaged with word crafting, I felt in some strange way that I was letting my practice down by attending to drawing, despite how much I love drawing as an art form. It was a very uncomfortable moment in this residency.
After wrestling with this problem and talking to artist friends I realised that I have definitely moved on from making drawings in the old style, with the drawing devices. But I haven’t finished making drawings per se, I realised that I have just changed the medium with which I make drawings.
I’ve written quite a lot during this residency and I was idly thinking about drawing, writing and the possibility of drawing with words. I wondered what the writing I have done for this residency would look like in a word cloud? I was thinking that perhaps I have used particular words very often and maybe looking at those words would inspire me to create something interesting for my final exhibition piece.
So I pasted my posts into some word cloud software. There were some interesting results, so I decided to copy and paste the words into Google docs and play around with them, trying to find some way of drawing with words. Surprisingly, when I pasted the word cloud words into the document I discovered that many of the words had somehow been stuck together, forming new and rather wonderful words. For instance, fungi and old became fungiold, way and road became wayroad, breath and raven, breathraven.
Reader, my brain exploded. Okay, not literally, but I was so excited to see these wonderful, randomly created new words. The process felt simillar to how I used to make drawings, in that I would set up an experiment which had an element of the unexpected and/or random process and then metaphorically step back and allow the outcome to generate itself. In drawing, that is effected when I design a device for making a drawing based on some input not deliberately controlled by my hand, as when the pen in the device moves because I am walking.
Using the word cloud felt similar. I wrote the initial words and input them into the word cloud, therefore setting up the conditions for something to happen, yet it was the way the word cloud software handled the text and the Google software handled the copy and paste process that determined the outcome of the combined words.
These combined words placed together in an arbitrary collection are word drawings, maybe even a poem. But I am the mother of a poet and I have enormous respect and awe for a poet’s effort and creativity in combining words and meaning and I feel that to call what I have created poetry is incorrect, even audacious. They are word drawings; odd, sometimes beautiful, nonsense in which we may nonetheless see meaning.
Just as I make the decision what type of pen or what colour ink to use in a walking drawing, therefore having some aesthetic control over the final drawings, so I took some control over the placement of words in my word drawings. Mostly, I left them as they were arranged by the word cloud software, but in some cases I moved them around and I sometimes inserted words, such as go, and or where to break up the list and improve the rhythm or flow of the piece.
Finally, I used some Open Source software called Twine to gather all the words into an interactive word drawing. Readers determine what text will be displayed on screen by clicking on the highlighted words, therefore having a different experience with each reading, depending on which words are selected.
I’m very happy with this result! I never could have imagined getting to here from where I began on this residency, back at the beginning of August. What is really exciting for me is that this feels like the start of a new way of working, a new stream to my practice, which is always evolving anyway. It was so good to pass through that uncomfortable place, revisiting the walking drawings, to come to this. Sometimes, being an artist is like walking along a path, one with switchbacks and branchlines and where the path ahead is often completely obscured by the trees.
An article written for Arts Professional by videoclub & Vital Capacities’ director, Jamie Wyld on art, accessibility and digital inclusion. The article can be read on Arts Professional by clicking here.
As I was researching on making an accessible virtual dance project someone shared this beautiful audio described dance project.
Stopgap Dance company and their very good audio described trailer of an outdoor dance work called FROCK.
Okay, they are not exactly failures, in fact they are very lovely drawings I think. These are some of the walking drawings I have made over the last couple of weeks. Most are black ink on paper but three are on clear acetate and one is on a dried green leaf.
These drawings have all been created using a very simple drawing device I made using wire, cardboard and a copper spring. I suspend a ink pen from the copper spring and take the whole contraption for a walk, the pen drawing as I move.
I’ve been attempting to film the process, with varying results. I bought myself an iPad, hoping for better film results, but it’s new technology for me and is currently proving quite frustrating, not least in the weird placement of the iPad camera to the far right of the device, which is really awkward in the drawing device. I might go back to my simple, but trusty mobile phone!
So back to the drawing board (or drawing device I should say)…
Last year I began toying with writing a novel. It’s not gone anywhere yet and on re-reading it’s fairly dire, as all first novel attempts are allowed to be.
One of the central characters in this story is a wild, grey haired woman who may or may not be centuries old and profoundly occult. She came to me as a vivid image, a woman in a long yellow coat walking the lanes and roads of Britain constantly twisting her fingers, which others think is a mere tic. What her twitching fingers are really doing is spinning unseen lines of magical force across the land.
“We were important people us spinsters. An’ I was one of the best. So they made me what I am today. Did the ritual, gave me to Britain. Spinster. Spinner. Walking the lines, spinning the magic.”
So. I am at that lovely (sarcasm that) stage in making when I have many ideas and no resolution. Yet. I’ve been dissatisfied with the drawing device work, feeling like it hit a dead end, uninspired with my results but feeling somehow nagged by the work, like it still had a way to go, even if I couldn’t see how to resolve it.
At the same time I’ve been thinking a lot about paths and walking and at the same time continuing to work on a long term project I am developing, called AuTCRONE Chronicles, which attempts to voice my grief about the current global ecological stupidity humans are embroiled in.
Anyway, one of the characters in the project (it’s a speculative fiction project) walks. She is a near immortal nomad bearing witness to climate disaster.
I want to write about her walking and have been thinking about how to tell the story of her walking even as I have been walking paths for this residency. And at the same time I’ve been making and filming walking drawings. I’m thinking stories and making drawings and have been unable to resolve either work and it’s been driving me mad!
Then I read the words I wrote for that occult character in the abandoned terrible novel and I think I’ve had a lightbulb moment.
What you don’t know about me is that I started my art career working exclusively with textile. I’m still a regular knitter (because I make all my clothes. And that’s another story) and I can spin on a drop spindle. I can spin on a drop spindle and walk at the same time. And so maybe I can gather up the threads of my making and storytelling and work them into something that might possibly involve spinning, drawing and storytelling.
It’s getting late and I’m tired after a long day walking but I think this idea might have legs. I’m going to run with it, metaphorically speaking. Goodnight.
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