Accentuate

I always said I would be an artist, the ‘obsession’ along with all things ‘dinosaur’ started when I was six. I remember it well as I was having my portrait drawn at the time and felt compelled to answer when prompted by the usual ‘what do you want to be when you grow up’.

Its been a tough journey but I am that artist now but the grown up part is still touch and go. I am very contrary on the one hand I love books and the subtlty of language but am dyslexic. I am also aspergers and this I do fight and am less comfortable with. They are both me….the rest is a mix, a melange of accumulated and fragmented experiences. What people see in us is not always what we intend…

I am what I reveal and what I reveal I am…

I know barriers and boundaries and those cruel lessons learnt at school still stay with me however I have learnt to be positive and use these autobiographical experiences within my work. Having never trained as an artist I just just drifted into professional and ‘obsessive’ ‘illustration’ after finishing my geology degree in 1983. I have always stayed ‘outside’ both socially and in my relationship with both the mainstream and disability arts scenes.

In the last 6 years with some encouragement I have lived my ‘artist dream’ self-defining as an ‘outsider’ artist (I am not a disabled artist nor ashamed of my disability – although I used to be for many years) I have learnt and I feel what stops us mainly is ourselves; we draw lines in the sand and boundaries on the ground not to keep others out but ourselves in.

I will bring this experience with me to Accentuate and push for a revolution, a ‘sea change’, but it has to be a change from the ‘inside out’. Excitingly there is a new movement arising in the South East where we are being defined by what we can ‘do’ and not by what others see is ‘wrong with us’.

If we change ourselves, we then change others opinions and attitudes when they ‘see us’….. we change 'their view' as well as 'ours'