Traces

A dynamic exhibition of wheelchair printing and giant mark making created by children and young people from Ash Field Academy – a SEND (special educational needs and disabilities) school in Leicester. Their large-scale artworks are installed alongside the work of five ground breaking, contemporary artists, each invited for their potential to inspire young people, to explore beyond the perceived limitations of disability.

Come and be transported by immersive stills of deep-sea diving in a wheelchair, projected digital, collaborative wheelchair drawings, dynamic dance duets (with paint!), and more.

Pasha Kincaid, Traces co-producer and co-curator, was artist in residence for the Paul Hamlyn Foundation funded SENsory Atelier Programme in 2022. Whilst there, after witnessing the incredibly joyful, wheelchair skills of one young pupil, weaving around the playground, bouncing a car tyre in front of him, she offered wheelchair printing as a mode of creative investigation.

This was the start of an exciting collaboration with Ash Field Academy, a school for children with special educational needs and disabilities in Leicester. In 2023 she returned to the school, this time with Morgan Stockton, Director of Seeds and Dreams, as co-producer along with a number of art activists, some disabled. Together they facilitated ten intensive sessions of wheelchair printing and giant mark making.

Children and young people, ages 4 to 19, were invited to print from their wheelchair wheels, as well as being offered a myriad of art tools to create with; all inspired by the traces made by the motion of rolling. A selection of these vibrant and dynamic artworks will be shown here, at Attenborough Arts Centre, alongside the works of four ‘grown-up’ contemporary artists.

These contemporary artists were selected for their potential to inspire young people to explore beyond the perceived limitations of disability, they were asked to offer work in response to the children’s creative journey, to explore the concept of traces, the traces that are left behind, and the traces that are made through motion. The works include new commissions, co-produced projects and several significant loans.

Artists

42 children and young people from six separate classes of Ash Field Academy, Leicester.

Sue Austin – a multimedia, performance and installation artist with a socially engaged practice shaped by, and emerging from, her experience of disability. As Artistic Director of Freewheeling she “recognises the power of starting at the ‘personal’ and finding archetypal, numinous images that ‘communicate’ through connecting with the universality of human experience.” She aims to find dramatic and powerful ways to reveal the ‘Hidden Secret’ of disability, arguing that this ‘secret’, if explored, valued and then shared, can act to heal the divisions created in the social psyche by cultural dichotomies that define the ‘disabled’ as ‘other’. ‘Creating the Spectacle!’ presents a ground breaking series of live-art and video works of an underwater wheelchair and work is in development to extend this artwork into another dimension by taking to the skies in a wheelchair that both flies and dives. Traces will feature films and stills from Sue Austin’s ‘Creating the Spectacle!’ and more.

Daryl Beeton – a Director and Performer who has worked extensively within the Theatre, Disability and young people’s arts sector for the last 25 years. He is a recognised cultural leader in youth arts participation as well as a high-profile advocate for disabled artists. The core of all of his work has been a belief that arts can enrich our lives and those of the communities we inhabit. Daryl is an active advocate for improving the rights of disabled and vulnerable people by promoting access and inclusion within the arts.

​Laura Dajao  – a Filipina wheelchair Freelance Integrated Dance Artist influenced by Hip Hop, Contemporary, Dancehall, Waacking and Locking. Based in East London, she has trained and performed with East London Dance, Candoco, Moxie Brawl, Gloucestershire Dance, Casson & Friends and Stopgap across various platforms around the UK. Independently, she looks to make cross collaborative art-form work with different artists, both locally and internationally.

Daryl Beeton and Laura Dajao will be performing a dynamic duet (involving paint!) as part of the Traces programme on April 7 2024. Details tbc. A film of their performance will then be shown within the exhibition.

Aminder Virdee – a South Asian transdisciplinary, multi-artform and STEM artist; arts facilitator; writer; filmmaker; consultant; community creative justice facilitator; founder of DIVA (Disabled Intersectional Voices in the Arts), and a Trustee at UK’s leading disability-led live music accessibility organisation Attitude is Everything. Exhibiting her work since 2008, her work is steered through an intersectional, autoethnographic, disability justice, crip technoscience, decolonisation, and magical realism lens. This kaleidoscopic lens is rooted in the reclamation of her quadruple-marginalised identity, lived experiences, and bodymind from countless systems of power and their associated gazes. Her work serves to challenge and disrupt conventional social norms and perceptions of normativity, neurotypicality, mobility, productivity, and prescribed ways of being in the world.

Aminder Virdee is making a commissioned sculptural piece to be revealed on February 22 at the launch.

Joseph Wilk –  A London born artist who uses computers to explore disability and disability to explore computers. He works with automative forms of expression that utilise new interfaces to work *with* alternative bodies. His experience of disability – living with pain, physical limitations, disillusionment and disconnection – strongly impacts his practice. He deconstructs, misuses and repurposes software and hardware to challenge notions of ownership, narrative and visibility.

Joseph Wilk is working with local wheelchair users exploring movement within the gallery to create a collaborative digital drawing to be projected in the space.

The work with children and young people was supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England and received sponsorship in kind from Bromakin Wheelchairs.

Gallery Opening Times:

Weekdays, 12pm – 5pm
Weekends, 12pm – 4pm

Image Copyright: We Are Freewheeling Ltd Artist: Artist: Sue Austin, Photo: Norman Lomax