Soft Spaces for Seizures, 2020
Soft Spaces for Seizures / 2020
Installation view at Birmingham School of Art
Wooden bookshelf, self-published artist manual, self-published manifesto, three high pile rugs.
This work was realised after a conversation with De'Anne Crooks covered how long term health conditions effect the way we navigate formal spaces. The rugs were made following a common ground of needing soft surfaces to have a seizures and instead finding refuge in the privacy of public bathrooms out of fear of being anything 'other' in unremitting spaces. These works will be for sale following the IKON sale show of Birmingham artists in 03/21.
Mike Neary, from University of Lincoln, discusses ‘radical history of cooperatives’ within such sub-ordinates capital of labour as a means of building human association on a new form of social value. Neary also discusses dealing with the institution within its own terms, but to commit to critique of the neo-liberal university to subordinate the mainstream into an alternative model: a means of ‘dealing with’ not ‘dealing independently from’. How do we adopt cooperative and collaborative models within existing structures instead of creating something independent and outside of the structure? It is a question I have repeatedly asked.
It is important who is asking these questions.
Hard floors are not safe for seizures, Victorian buildings do not speak of historic beauty but of an entire history of systemic racism and ‘othering’ of anybody who is not, concrete steps and a lift that rarely functions do not accommodate bodies who need more care, and rooms that value the space over the activity that it houses feeds vortex of capitalist consumers rather than subsistence and personal development.