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Sarah Crompton—

The writer and journalist on the magic of truly

diverse art

Perspectives on the value of art and culture

Sarah Crompton

Richard Dawson sings songs unlike any you have heard – aching, discordant, impressionistic stories of childhood, shot through with strange, discombobulating sounds and sometimes disturbing lyrics.

‘The Vile Stuff’, for example, is one of two 16-minute epics on his much-praised album Nothing Important. It tells the story of a school trip fuelled by the liquid of the title – ‘and some wee scallywag’s brung/A Coca-Cola bottle containing a spirit’ – that goes so horribly wrong that the narrator ends up in A&E with a severed tendon caused by attempting to pierce a coconut with a screwdriver while another boy gets into bed with a female teacher ‘much to the chagrin of the deputy headmaster/Whose scarlet skull is firmly wedged between her thighs’.

The images pour forth, barely lyrics, more like a fierce stream of consciousness remembrance, accompanied by experimental, pulsing sound; the effect is both wondrous and disconcerting, like being whirred round inside a Gravitron while the floor drops away.

Dawson, who is 33, is visually impaired. Like his brother Iain, a world champion paratriathlete, he has a genetic eye condition called X-linked juvenile retinoschisis, which he says has informed his music. ‘Faces take a long time to come into form, and there are some interesting hallucinations. You almost have a head start in seeing things as blurred, because it’s important not to be black and white about things.’

Would you in simply hearing Dawson’s songs, have thought he was disabled? Probably not. But you could not think him anything other than strikingly original, with a remarkable gift for apprehending the world in a different way. His art is refreshingly his own; his difference is a powerful creative force.

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The same would be true of Katherine Araniello, who often works under the soubriquet SickBitchCrips. There is no missing the fact that she is in a wheelchair; her presence is central to the films and art she makes. But the defining characteristic of her work is her personality and the way in which she transmutes her viewpoint into art that is confrontational and idiosyncratic: her film Follow Me on my Journey to Die is a savage satire on the beliefs of those who think if you are disabled you must be in favour of assisted suicide; Sick is a sharp attack on the conflation of disability with illness.

‘As an artist I am someone who chose to study fine art and through that process to make work that is affected by the fact that I am a disabled person,’ she says. ‘That is an integral part of how I operate. I make work that doesn’t elicit from the viewer a sense of empathy or sympathy and that already changes the perception of how people usually perceive disability.’

At the opposite end of the spectrum to Araniello’s directly political and confrontational art is Paul Cummins, who was awarded funding under the Unlimited programme for disabled artists, which formed part of the Cultural Olympiad in 2012, to make ceramic flowers to celebrate the British landscape. Cummins has a colour associated form of dyslexia. His Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red, the field of red ceramic poppies that surrounded the Tower of London last year, caught the national mood as people sought to commemorate the beginning of the First World War. He made an image that can never be forgotten.

Sarah Crompton

‘I make work that doesn’t elicit from the viewer a sense of empathy or sympathy and that already changes the perception of how people usually perceive disability’

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All three of these artists represent a tiny fraction of the swathe of talented disabled artists in Britain today. Their work has extraordinary range and great imagination. The contribution it makes to a broader way of apprehending and appreciating art and culture is central to Arts Council England’s Creative case for diversity – a policy that argues arts organisations can only be strengthened by putting diversity at the centre of their strategies.

In launching the Creative case for diversity last year, Arts Council England chair Peter Bazalgette explained that for too long the responsibility for promoting diversity had been abandoned to a few companies. They had done an excellent job, ‘but focusing on these organisations has diverted our attention from promoting change across the whole arts sector’. From now on, ‘the responsibility for promoting diversity within the leadership, workforce, programming and audiences must belong to all our funded arts organisations’.

This is easier said than done. Disability is a complex and politically charged subject. It is hard sometimes to find the language to engage in the conversation. Even if, like me, you have followed culture closely all your life, and think you grasp its hidden lineaments, it is confusing to find that artists may identify themselves as disabled for funding purposes, but do not talk about it in the public arena. Or that disabled artists themselves do not agree whether their work needs directly to address disability and society’s attitudes.

Sarah Crompton

‘The responsibility for promoting diversity within the leadership, workforce, programming and audiences must belong to all our funded arts organisations’

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The relationship of disabled art to the ‘mainstream’ has long been fraught. Deborah Williams, formerly Senior Diversity Officer at Arts Council England and now Diversity Officer at the BFI, knows the territory. ‘The disability arts movement has its origins in the identity politics of the 1980s, when disabled people didn’t exist in terms of the mainstream,’ she says. ‘You were making a political statement simply by being a disabled artist. And the point of a company such as Graeae, which was founded in 1980, was to get disabled artists into the mainstream.’

As time has moved on, so has the thinking. That notion of forcing general acceptance has become a complex discussion about the way in which the work of disabled artists may be important in and of itself. ‘You are an artist like any other, but your art is informed by your disability,’ says Williams. ‘It is up to you whether you identify yourself as a disabled artist. The point is that you are an artist making a piece with the expectation that people will come and be enthralled, challenged, threatened, as with any other artist.’

A successful example of inclusivity would be the performances by Deafinitely Theatre as part of the programme at Shakespeare’s Globe. In 2012, Love’s Labour’s Lost became the first full-length Shakespeare play to be performed in British Sign Language. More than that, the use of BSL seemed a compelling artistic choice, with the movement and demeanour of the signers adding to the impact of the production. Their next Shakespearean venture, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, was equally successful.

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Tony Heaton, director of Shape Arts, argues that the work of disabled artists revivifies the world; it is more dangerous, more urgent than a lot of ‘new’ work. It was Melvyn Bragg who called it ‘the last avant-garde’ and it continues to explore places many artists are afraid to go, opening up perspectives that would otherwise remain closed.

But there are caveats. The first, inevitably, is around funding. The Arts Council has ring-fenced an extra £6 million to promote diversity within its work, but disabled and deaf artists may have distinct economic challenges, especially with changes to access to work and independent living funds. The Creative case for diversity is a bold vision for integration, but will there be the resources to make sure that the mainstream is physically open to all?

As Katherine Araniello points out, if you are an artist whose level of disability makes it difficult even to access the building in which your work is being shown, the support you receive has to be real – not notional. And for some disabled artists, there is a fear that being accepted into the majority culture may result in a loss.

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Vici Wreford-Sinnott, a champion of disability and mental health theatre, has long campaigned for the monoculture in which disabled artists work to be enlivened by different viewpoints. ‘We want equality so why do we need to distinguish ourselves in this way?’ she says. ‘But from my point of view, I think it is a bit early yet because I don’t feel disabled people have equal status. And until we have got that equality we are going to have to actively say I am this person and the work that I create represents my voice, and also possibly the voices of other people with similar experiences. We all have fascinating and multi-faceted lives and no one wants to be described by one adjective, but I think we are not there yet.’

There will be much debate ahead. Yet for all the complexities, the argument of the Creative Case for Diversity could turn the world on its head. It asks audiences to see difference as a powerful positive force that enriches our culture not as an exercise in box-ticking or inclusion. If organisations can truly make diversity work and put it at the heart of their programming, it should create more opportunity not less. It asks that identity be protected at the same time as creativity is unleashed in the mainstream. If that can be accomplished, the next chapter in the history of disabled artists could very well be full of brilliant surprises.

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