Envision Your Reality
2012-09-22
This caught my eye. Sue Austin, artist, wheelchair user since 1996, designed an underwater wheelchair that she can dance and gently fly in. She was told it couldn't work, but she persisted, and the result is so striking and beautiful, dreamlike, an ocean ballet. You can dream your world into being, re-vision and re-create your definition of you. Truly Shamanic.
Her video "Creating the Spectacle, Part 1, Finding Freedom" is at the bottom of the article in the link. Enjoy!
http://www.theworld.org/2012/09/wheelchair-ballet-sue-austin/
"Sue Austin: When I started diving I became really aware that the associations attached to scuba gear are ones of excitement and adventure and freedom and that they extended your range of activity in the world just like my power chair did. But the associations attached to my power chair, when I asked people for the first words that came to mind, were ones of fear, limitation, pity, restriction, illness, and so on, and through my arts practice I came to realize I had internalized those ideas and it had changed my identity and I couldn’t quite work out what had happened until I made this connection and I started making artwork that was about using the wheelchair as an object to literally paint or play or have fun with. And so when I realized scuba gear extended your range of activity in the same way, I thought, “Mm, I wonder what will happen if I put scuba gear and an NHS wheelchair together,” and NHS is the National Health Service in Britain, so it’s the sort of very basic chair that people get if they’re not able to afford one themselves."
