Category Archives: Olympics

Murals with a message need a new home

The access for all mural, east London (photo: Vision)
Para athletes mural, east London (photo: Vision)
Para athletes mural, east London (photo: Vision)

The public is being asked to suggest permanent homes for a trio of murals created to highlight disability issues.

A group of disabled artists, the Vision collective, created the collaborative art boards which have been displayed for a limited time on the Shoreditch Art Wall, east London, to mark the recent World Para Athletics Championships. The collective’s mission is “to inspire artists with disabilities to have an integral voice in their community through their artwork”.

Murals with a message on display in east London (photo: Vision)

A fourth mural, created with children supported by the Action for Children charity, is earmarked for use by the charity.

The murals are up until this Sunday, and the artists are inviting ideas for their relocation. The Vision group’s facilitator, Sarah Hughes, says: “We feel they are suitable for play areas, shared community space, special schools, hospitals, the Olympic Park- there are lots of possibilities.”

The Vision artists include Michelle Baharier, Dawn Barber, Dwain Bryan, Julie Cordell, David Elton, Lynda Evans, Lorraine Peacock and Sandra Pink.

For more information see the website or to suggest a location, contact sarah@murals4mankind.org

Disability history: “I quite clearly remember being tied to the cot sides”

A performance by secondary school pupils based on the stories of disabled people from post-war Britain to modern day (photo: Jon Legge/University of Leeds)

“I quite clearly remember being tied to the cot sides,” recalls Florence, now in her 70s, of the childhood she spent in hospital. “Literally, two wrists tied to the cot sides with cotton tape so as I couldn’t get up and I couldn’t sit up because they – the doctors – had decided that if there’s something wrong with your back, you have to lie prone.”

Florence’s memories are among those featured in a project that encourages schools to create theatrical performances based on real stories of disability from people born in the 1940s, 60s and 80s. The Changing Lives, Changing Times project involved workshops at three Leeds schools over five weeks last summer and led to the development of teaching packs. These help teachers run awareness-raising workshops about disability and are being sent out to UK schools by the end of the year.

The drive coincides with Disability History Month, which starts today.

The rest of my piece in the Guardian’s social care pages is here, and I’m devoting the remainder of this post to extracts from the stories of Florence and Dan, both born in the 1940s, Poppy, born in the 1960s, and Holly, born in the 1980s, reflecting the contrasting experiences of disabled people in different eras.

Florence was born in the late 1940s, the daughter of a single parent, but when doctors diagnosed that she would never walk, her birth mother left her. Florence attended mainstream schools throughout the 1950s. She left school and entered her first paid job in the mid 1960s as a telephonist and clerk. Her second job was as a typist. Florence is a trained social worker. She is single, she has no children, she drives her own car:

“There were all sorts of problems of having a child that wasn’t going to be able to get do things normally. The children’s home really wasn’t ideal and they decided that they would foster me out because there were too many kids running about in the children’s home and because I wasn’t mobile I was getting picked on, getting hit, getting spat at by the other children.

I then went to foster parents who, although they knew that I wasn’t going to be able to walk, said: “Oh yeah, we’ll manage that fine”. And they didn’t, and after two months I was back in the children’s home. The children’s home said “no, we can’t cope with her here because she’s not mobile” so I went back into hospital, where I didn’t really need to be but because there was nowhere else suitable and they couldn’t find another foster placement, so that’s where I went.

My mother still was saying, “I don’t want anything to do with this child’, which was really difficult for her because any time that I needed any surgery or any intervention they had to get hold of her, and every time I needed something obviously it brought it back to her that I wasn’t living with her. So that must have been really difficult for her.

A relative of a child that was in the next bed to me for quite a while came in and after a couple of times coming in she realised that there wasn’t anybody visiting me, because nobody from the children’s home came, my mother didn’t come, so nobody came. So she said; “Well could I still continue to visit after my niece goes home?”. And they [hospital staff] said: “Yeah if you want to”. You know: Why would you want to do this? And she said: “I just seem to have got on with her and she’s got a really nice smile”. And so after a couple of visits she’d sort of said to the nursing staff “Is there anything else I can do?” And the nursing staff had obviously said, “Well, you know, it’d be nice if you maybe spoke to the social worker”, and so they set up an appointment with the social worker – and I ended up going out to them. Initially short-term fostering and then it turned out as adoption eventually. So that was really just luck and chance.

I had absolutely no idea where I was going because there was no proprietary work done – no photograph of the house, nothing. They didn’t do things like that then, they just assumed that a child would cope with it, you know. So we ended up at this house and there were like two steps at the front door. Although they knew I couldn’t walk it just didn’t register. I suppose because they felt I could stand up, I could walk, and the two are not at all related, but to people that have not known disability … why would you think about it?

I don’t think my adoptive brother was really consulted that much about it and I think he just took the attitude, “well, I’m an adult, it’ll not bother me”. And so, because there was such a big gap there really wasn’t a very close bonding at all and there still isn’t, but there is with his children, so that’s okay.

Apparently one day when we were in the town shopping … my adoptive mother saw my other, saw my natural mother coming in the door … … and we turned and walked away. Now I have not even got any memory of what my natural mother looks like. I have nothing.”

Dan, born in the 1940s:

“I can remember, I should imagine possibly 7 or 8, being in and out of hospital and, it was suggested by the medical profession that I should go to a special school, and I always remember it was a real big old type of building and we used to be taken on a… on a blue single decker bus and this school was um, it… it was more about doing this like making raffia baskets and playing with you know, clay and they… they had gardens at the back and used to let us potter about, digging things up or planting things, but it didn’t seem to be you know, really academic type of thing, it was all about… and I always thought I was the least disabled person there to be honest.

You were sort of cotton-woolled, you went in and there was always lots of people to help you, you know go to your classroom, help you if you needed it, sitting down, people brought things to you all the time to your desk or whatever, and um, it was… you knew you was different and you had this all the time, you knew that you were, you was different from anybody else, those outside, your friends at ordinary school, you needed this particular facility because you had a disability, and it was always the physical disability that was sort of, you know, important. That’s why I’m sure you know, it was as though you were limited, your mental capacity was limited.”

Poppy, born in the 1960s, went to residential special school at the age of four until she was 16. The school became her social world and she remembers feeling bored and lonely at home during the summer holidays. Her ability to move around independently was limited by an inaccessible environment. At school there was a strict institutional regime of normalisation including intensive physio and speech therapy (“the more dependent you were, the less privileges you got”) and there was corporal punishment for non-compliance and allegations of sexual abuse from some children: “I knew it wasn’t right, but there was no one to tell”. Poppy also saw changes towards a more enlightened attitude in the late 1970’s and whilst academic expectations for the pupils were not high she was able to gain enough basic qualifications to enrol at a further education college. Here is Poppy’s story:

“My first memory of school was crawling down the corridor after my mum and dad had gone, and I was in tears, because I didn’t really understand what was happening. I never walked, I was on the floor, I always crawled, so I crawled down the corridor. So the headmistress picked me up, shouted at me and put me on my feet. They had bars on the walls, and she said ‘we don’t crawl here, we walk’ and I had to walk and I’ll never forget that. It was pretty traumatic at the time.

The school was very institutionalised, and you got up at 7 every day, including weekends, which I wasn’t too happy about, and they had set meals, you had set bath times, set bed times, the day completely structured. Luckily we did have lessons, they did try to educate you, as much as they though was possible, but I still think we had a substandard education. It wasn’t very tasking.

I remember one child getting hit around the head, and I knew it wasn’t right, but I was too scared to tell anyone.

A new headmistress came, and she had very new ideas about disabled children, and I think she had higher expectations of us, and she taught us about classical music, how to appreciate the arts, I think we responded to that quite well. We would go to the theatre or we would go on days out to the Tate Gallery.

The aim was to get us as independent as possible, but not independent to use a wheelchair to get about; you must walk, you must talk. I had speech therapy, although you couldn’t tell now. I had speech therapy, and , I had physiotherapy, and we had to dress ourselves, we had to feed ourselves, and some people weren’t able to do that; the more dependent you were, the less privileges you got. So because I could get dressed on my own, I could sneak a few minutes in bed longer in the morning, I had more freedom, you know, I could do as much as anyone, I could come and go as I pleased.

I think young people have a lot of pressure today, I think it’s harder, I know one lad, he’s at a non-disabled school and he finds it really hard to kind of be part of the whole system, because he is different, he knows he is different and in some ways, his school mates treat him differently and he hates that. I didn’t get that at school, we were all the same.

College was like a right of passage. It was where I learnt to become who I am now. The way I learnt to become, I think, an independent adult, not in the sense of learning to walk, dress and all that stuff but to think for myself, to have the choices that I wanted, and to be able to make those choices. Also it made the selection process more powerful because you knew you’d been selected because of your intelligence, and not someone patting you on the head.

I majored in English and my minor was in Sociology and we studied ethnicity, racism, and sexism, and different kinds of religions and beliefs, and age discrimination and class, nothing about disability, so at that point I wasn’t even aware I had a political identity as a disabled person.”

Holly was born, several months prematurely, in the 1980s. She was not expected to live for more than a few days and doctors advised her parents not to bond with her. Her parents separated after her impairment was diagnosed, so Holly lived with her mother, who gave up her career, and a step-brother from a previous marriage. Her mother re- married. Holly was sent to a residential special school when she was two-years-old, and stayed there until she was 18. When she left school, at the age of 18, Holly also left home, partly because she had become more distant from her parents, and because she had experienced some domestic violence and abuse. She went to a mainstream college to study dance, but never finished due to back problems. Holly lives alone in a council flat. She works as a volunteer for a local disability organization and a charity that supports children who have been abused. Holly has aspirations to do a paid job and marry her boyfriend:

“Some people are completely ignorant, not through malice but they are ignorant when it comes to disability. Somebody’s already formed in their own head what a disability means and if you kind of break their train of thought about what a disability is, you kind of completely shock them.

I think it’s changing very, very slowly but I don’t think it’s changing at the pace that it should be. I think there’s still an awful lot of undertone, tokenism, you know, people still get patronised when they’ve got a disability. I actually find the worst people for it are teenage girls – like girls in between the ages of let’s say fifteen to early twenties. I don’t know whether it’s because you know, I don’t quite understand, but I’ve experienced really quite bad attitudes with that kind of age group.

I still find it absolutely disgusting that women that need to access places like women’s refuges are turned away on the basis of their disability. I think people are still like –what do you mean domestic violence? Well, you’re disabled. Because they either think that you – that you are completely spoilt and wrapped up in cotton wool as a child, and obviously you can’t experience domestic violence from a partner because disabled people don’t have sex. I find the – worst thing a parent can do is pull a child away when they want to know why that lady is in a wheelchair. I wish to god parents would just let their children ask. And then maybe we could start educating from that age.”

Taken from Changing Lives, Changing Times, a Leeds University-led project and published with thanks to Dr Sonali Shah.

Photo project promotes Roma and new migrant culture

An image from the Roma and new migrants photo project

The intriguing photographs here are from those in a new exhibition created by children from Roma, Slovak and Polish communities in east London,

The works, created using pinhole photography, have been produced by 12 young people aged eight to 14 from Roma or new migrant backgrounds. The show is part of a Children’s Society project, the Roundabout Arts Project, and the images reflect the children’s views of their heritage and the summer of Olympic sport. The young people from Newham created 20 pinhole photographs and an animated film (below).

An Olympic-related image from the Roundabout Project exhibition

The project, a partnership between the Children’s Society New Londoners Roma/New Migrants Project, art group Click Academy, aims to promote a greater understanding of European migrants and Roma culture, showing the communities’ contribution to London life.

Artist Marta Kotlarska’s Click Academy uses pinhole photography to encourage social change (with the aim of showing it is possible to “make something out of nothing” and at little cost). As Kotlarska has blogged on the Children’s Society website: “Our hopes for the children to learn the realities of the creative process and have the opportunity to express their creativity were realised. Roma children often don’t have access to the arts because of discrimination and social exclusion and we wanted to change this.”

* The Roundabout Arts Project exhibition is open for three weeks at The Hub, 123 Star Lane, London, E16 4PZ, 9am-8pm from Friday 19 October to Thursday 8 November.

Fragile X on film: how Mission to Lars could change attitudes

Meher Salman
“Oh really? But she’s so good at dance” was the response of an acquaintance who misheard my explanation that my daughter Raana has fragile X syndrome – she thought I’d said “fragile legs”.

Amusing though this incident from a few years ago is, it demonstrates how few people know about fragile X, the most common form of inherited learning disability estimated to affect at least 1 in 4000 males and 1 in 6000 females.

It is European fragile X awareness day next week, Wednesday 10 October, and the aim is to raise the profile of the syndrome in 16 countries across Europe.

Above, Kate Spicer and her brother Tom at a concert in the fragile x film Mission to Lars (photo: Mission to Lars)

I recently went to a screening of the film Mission To Lars, which features a man with the syndrome as its central subject, and I didn’t quite know what to expect.

But in fact all of us who are affected by fragile X can identify with this film in so many ways. The main reason I feel it’s such an important film is that it raises awareness of fragile X in a touching and moving way.

Tom’s obsession with Lars reminded me of my daughter’s obsession with the singer Noel Sullivan which began after she watched Popstars, the 2001 reality TV show that he was featured in. Even now she’ll mention him randomly in conversations, imagining what song he’ll be singing, or incorporate him in doodles, and likes to look up his latest show on the internet.

On the plus side, her obsession gives her something to talk about and do (from printing off photos to flicking through show brochures) and it’s definitely sparked an interest in musical theatre and music. The flip side is that she constantly repeats herself when talking about him (“when are we going to see the show?”) and it’s totally removed from reality.

The scenes in the film which show Tom hesitating to meet the drummer he hero-worships reminded me of the time when Raana went to see her own idol in a West End show but then got cold feet and refused to go backstage to meet him. I was left standing opposite him – he’d very kindly come out to say hello to her – holding a mug she’d made for him in a pottery class while Raana ran to the other end of the pavement, waving shyly.

Another striking similarity was when Tom relaxes when, during the filming, he “helps” with sound recording. Raana also feels more comfortable when she has something to do, like helping with cooking when the whole family’s together. She likes to have a role rather than feel like a spare part.

The relationship between the three siblings (the love and support Kate and Will give their brother Tom was very touching) reminded me of the relationship between Raana and her two older sisters.

What moved me most was Tom’s bravery and how he overcame his anxiety. Routine is very important to people with fragile X and for him to leave his familiar surroundings and travel hundreds of miles on this adventure was admirable.

If you see the film, it’ll give you a better understanding of fragile X and of how it affects not only the individual, but the family dynamics and siblings. For people who have a FX member of family, it makes you feel are if you’re not alone. Watching some of Tom’s reactions, I couldn’t help but think “I’ve been there”.

Although I saw Mission to Lars before the Paralympics, the summer’s sporting events did make me hope that more people would be more aware of disability and learning disability issues, and people’s attitudes should change for the long-term. Films like Mission to Lars will help bring about this change.

A perspective on the Paralympics

Singer and rapper Dean Rodney, part of the Games Through Our Eyes website
There’s no shortage of media coverage of the Olympics and Paralympics, but one new online platform offers a unique and important perspective on the games.

Games Through Our Eyes is an accessible website for the 2012 Paralympic Games created by young reporters with learning disabilities. The team is supported by arts group Heart n’ Soul and social enterprise communications agency Poached Creative.

Games Through Our Eyes is covering wheelchair rugby, the three Paralympic sports open to people with learning disabilities (swimming, athletics and table tennis) as well as the Cultural Olympiad. This year is first time in 12 years that people with learning disabilities have been allowed to compete after Spain’s basketball team faked their disabilities in the 2000 Sydney games.

The reporting team includes Dean Rodney, a 22-year-old singer and rapper with autism whose audio-visual project, the Dean Rodney Singers, is part of the Cultural Olympiad. Dean, who has honed his performing talents through Heart n’Soul and who I’ve blogged about before, is part of the Unlimited showcase at London’s Southbank Centre starting today. Unlimited is staging cultural events alongside the Paralympic Games, having made major new commissions in disability, arts, culture and sport (for artist Rachel Gadsen’s contribution to the Cultural Olympiad, for example, see this previous post).

As far as the new website goes, Lilly Cook, one member of the reporting team, says the aim is for everyone with disabilities and learning disabilities “to be able to find out about them and all the other amazing things going on around them.” As Lilly adds in a recent blogpost: “Paralympic sports are just as exciting, professional and emotional as the Olympics.”

Alongside Lilly and Dean, the other reporters are Nicola Holley, Poppy Collie, Shalim Ali, and Laura Jarvis.

Expect some good coverage of Dean’s installation; the Dean Rodney Singers is an international digital collaboration of 72 musicians and dancers with and without disabilities from countries including Japan, China, South Africa, Germany, Brazil, Croatia and the UK. Their online interaction results in new music, dance and video and 23 of their pieces will be launched at the Southbank Centre today, with audience participation promised through interactive technology (the idea is viewers and listeners engage with the performers).

As well as the Dean Rodney Singers, other Heart n Soul artists perform in events during the Paralympics – the fabulous Lizzie Emeh at the Trafalgar Square Live Site this Sunday – fresh from accompanying Beverly Knight at the Paralympics opening ceremony – and The Fish Police (which Dean Rodney also fronts) at the Potters Field Live Site on Monday. The arts group’s spectacular multi-media club night The Beautiful Octopus Club (created by and for people with learning disabilities) is on Friday 7th September at Southbank Centre, the final weekend of Southbank’s Paralympic Games celebrations.

Keep up with the news on Twitter by following the Games Through Our Eyes team at @ourparagames

Art fights social taboos

Living with chronic health problems and facing social taboos are issues at the heart of an international artistic collaboration about HIV/AIDS as part of the Cultural Olympiad.

Portrait by Rachel Gadsen © Rachel Gadsden

© Rachel Gadsden

The powerful images here are part of the Unlimited Global Alchemy project
which launches today as part of the London 2012 Festival. After today’s launch at the Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology in Cambridge, the exhibition culminates at the Southbank Centre during the Paralympic Games.

The project has been produced by Artsadmin and commissioned by the Unlimited programme launched to celebrate arts, culture and sport by deaf and disabled people.

© Rachel Gadsden

Artist Rachel Gadsden, who has lived with disability all her life and whose inspiring work I came across last year, began the project after seeing the work of South African artist Nondumiso Hlwele at the museum in Cambridge – Body Map, below, reflects Hlwele’s experience of living with HIV.

Body Map © Nondumiso Hlwele

Gadsen travelled to the Khayelitsha Township, Cape Town, pictured below, to collaborate with the artist-activist collective which Hlwele leads. The works in today’s exhibition were created over a six week residency in Cape Town in October last year.

Khayelitsha township where today's works were developed

Together, the striking pieces show what it’s like to live with disabling conditions and social prejudice. “At the heart of this life-affirming and timely collaboration is a celebration of survival against the odds,” say the artists. “It is also about access to art in a very broad sense, participation, and the potential for bridges to be built across cultural, educational and geographical divides.”

You can follow the project on Twitter with the hashtag 
#UGAlchemy and the exhibition is at the Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology in Cambridge until 18 August before it transfers to the Southbank Centre, London in September as part of the Unlimited Festival. There will also be a collaborative performance work once the project transfers to the Southbank.