Bordered Belonging

Photo Credit: Matt Denham

Leah Clements is an artist from and based in East London whose practice spans film, photography, performance, writing, installation, and other media. Her work is concerned with the relationship between psychological, emotional, and physical states often through personal accounts of unusual or hard-to-articulate experiences. Her practice also focuses on sickness/cripness/disability in art, in critical and practical ways. She is the 1st prize recipient of the 2023 Mosaic Art Award, Hauser & Wirth London.

Jamie Hale is a poet, curator, director, theatre maker, screenwriter, and otherwise indecisively multidisciplinary creative. Their work narrates the intimate urgency of having a disabled body in society, linking nature, mortality, and universality, both welcoming and challenging readers and audiences. They were a Jerwood Poetry Fellow 2021-2022 and founded the Disabled Poets’ Prize in 2022 as well as CRIPtic Arts and won the Evening Standard Future Theatre Fund Director/Theatre Maker of the Year Award for their poetry show NOT DYING in 2021.

Jamila Prowse is an artist and writer, propelled by curiosity and a desire to understand herself through making. Informed by her lived experience of disability, mixed race ancestry and the loss of her father at a young age; her work is research driven and indebted to Black feminist and crip scholars. She is an active participant in a rich and growing contemporary disabled artistic community and has been ongoingly researching, programming, and creating around cripping the art world, since 2018. Self-taught, Jamila is drawn to experimenting with a multitude of mediums in order to process her grief and radical hope. Currently articulating through moving image, painting, photography, textiles, and performance, she is a member of Open School East 23-24.

Sick Bed – Leah Clements: ‘Sick Bed’ by Leah Clements is a VR game artwork that situates the viewer in bed with an unnamed illness. Commissioned by SPACE London as part of the Art+Tech Residency 2017-18, it seeks to negate the more prevalent VR ’empathy experiences’ which are always temporary and usually fun. For Bordered Belonging, Clements shares a moving-image first person demo of the VR game being played.

Spoons (After Carolyn Lazard) – Jamila Prowse: ‘Spoons (After Carolyn Lazard)’ by Jamila Prowse is a moving image work based upon Spoons Theory; which uses spoons as a visualisation of the disparity in energy reserves between disabled and abled people. Over a 6-month period, Jamila exchanged voicenotes with three disabled artists – Leah Clements, Carolyn Lazard and Bella Milroy – about their personal relationships to spoons theory, which has then been turned into an original score using an algorithm by sound artist Felix Taylor. The work is made in reference to Carolyn Lazard’s 2018 moving image, ‘Crip Time’, and mirrors the same bird-eyes view shot of a tablecloth.

This piece was Commissioned through Sussex University’s Full Stack Feminism project. This research/project was funded by UKRI-AHRC and the Irish Research Council under the ‘UK-Ireland Collaboration in the Digital Humanities Research Grants Call’.

Crip Quilt – Jamila Prowse: ‘Crip Quilt’ is a large-scale, patchwork, textile quilt translating the individual and collective experience of disability. With contributions from National Disability Art Collection and Archive, three new collated oral histories with disabled artists of colour and the artist’s own lived experience; each square in the patchwork relays a snapshot of a disabled artist’s life. While making the quilt, Jamila found that stitching aids symptoms of her disability, and her embroidered reflections took on a diaristic, confessional tone. Made on crip time, across 15 months, predominantly from the artist’s sick bed, the process became therapeutic in nature. The materiality of the quilt is weighted to reflect the use of weighted blankets to manage anxiety disorders and alleviate flare-ups and burnouts for neurodivergent people. The quilt will be accompanied by creative access adjustments of a soundscape, which is part audio description and part audio guide, and a moving image work for remote viewing.

I wish to be held by a river – Jamie Hale: Jamie Hale explains the story behind their poem, ‘I wish to be held by a river’: “I was in the early stages of respiratory failure, and confronting my own mortality. The poem holds both the dislocation of living with uncertain prognosis, and the cognitive disorientation high carbon-dioxide levels can cause. Writing it, I was trying to find some sort of peace. Natural bodies are subject to forces over which we ultimately have no control, except the personal question of how we respond to and accept the influence of that nature.”