IN/Visible Disabled Women’s National Arts Collective
in association with ARC Stockton, Arts Depot London and Little Cog
​
All the Women We Could Have Been

Extract from an Artwork by Honor Flaherty

Exhibition & Workshop News

​You are invited to our brand new unique exhibition taking place both North and South thanks to the wonderful ARC Stockton and Arts Depot London. 
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A powerful and playful exploration of what life might have been like for disabled women had external limitations not been in place. But it’s not a sad story, instead it’s a unique opportunity to see especially created new works of art by some of the Disability Arts Movements leading disabled women artists and thinkers, all of whom are aged over 50, play with representation and expectation in works which are witty, poetic and provocative in this call-to-arms celebration. Each work presented is individual and unique with artists working across a wide range of mediums including photography, painting, wall sculpture, collage, textiles and embroidery. We’ve seen the work and we cannot wait to bring it all together in one place and share it with you.

IN/Visible means in and visible to us - we’re part of the arts and we’re not going away! We’ve got lots of experience and lots to say about our experiences and the change we’ve been instrumental in creating. We’re a group of disabled women who got together for a short project during lockdown and valued each other and the space so much that we decided to become a group rather than a project. We have eleven galleries of work on Little Cog’s website and have been working together in real time online to create the pieces of work in this exhibition. We’ve explored narratives: around disabled women; older disabled women in the rights, justice and arts movements; intersectionality; what being activists has meant to our work; ideologies which impact us; and we celebrate who we are.

The artists in the collective are Michelle Baharier, Samantha Blackburn, Caroline Cardus, Honor Flaherty, Pauline Heath, Cheryl Martin, JulieMc McNamara, Lynne McFarlane, Dolly Sen, and Vici Wreford-Sinnott. See below for more information. 

We are also hosting a number of workshops for older disabled women to chat about what's important to us whilst being creative. You don't need to be an artist to attend and you don't need to know us to attend - we are reaching out and all older disabled women are welcome.

Venues and Dates

ARC, Stockton-On-Tees, North East  3 - 31 August 2023

Exhibition Opening 
Wednesday 2 August 2023 at 6.30-8.00pm both in person and online - you are welcome to attend but places must be booked in advance.
Speeches and readings from artists at 6.45pm. BSL interpreted. Online captions.
Light refreshments will be served.
Booking for the opening is by email to [email protected] and please state whether it is in person or online attendance. 

Access at the exhibition
The exhibition programme is available in standard print, large print and audio.

All exhibition items have an audio track available through QR codes exhibited alongside all text and images which can be accessed by smartphone. If you do not have a smartphone a device can be borrowed from Box Office to access the QR codes.

The exhibition is on the 2nd floor of ARC and is accessible by both stairs and a lift. The gallery space is a level space with no steps.

Please check ARC’s opening hours for exhibition times but do note that the gallery space has groups working in it on Wednesdays from 10-3.30pm and Thursday 10am-12pm and so accessing on those days and times is less easy. 

Access - ARC | Stockton Arts Centre (arconline.co.uk)

How to Get to ARC: Visit Us​


​Arts Depot, North Finchley, London 6 - 28 September 2023

Exhibition Opening at  Tuesday 5 September 2023 6.30-8.00pm both in person and online - you are welcome to attend but places must be booked in advance, clearly stating IN PERSON or ONLINE please.
Speeches and readings at 6.45pm BSL interpreted.
Light refreshments will be served. Ticket reservations to be confirmed soon. 

​Access at the exhibition
The exhibition programme is available in standard print, large print and audio.

All exhibition items have an audio track available through QR codes exhibited alongside all text and images which can be accessed by smartphone. If you do not have a smartphone a device can be borrowed from Box Office to access the QR codes.

The exhibition is on the first floor of Arts Depot and is accessible by lift and stairs. The exhibition walls are in the public spaces of the Cafe and the Foyer. 

Please check Arts Depot Opening Hours. 

Accessibility | artsdepot

Getting Here | artsdepot
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Workshops

Valuing Each Other Workshops for Disabled Women by Disabled Women
​Hosted by Vici Wreford-Sinnott
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It all started for us by creating a space for older disabled women to come together and chat whilst being creative. Artistic skill was not a pre-requisite as we were going to explore a range of artforms together. And so we're committed to continuing to create spaces like that. We'd like to invite disabled women over 50 to come along, have a chat and try something crafty. You don't have to know us to come along - all older disabled women are welcome. We use the term disabled to include people with mental health conditions, long term chronic conditions, physical and sensory conditions, you might be Deaf, visually impaired, neurodivergent or have a neurological condition. 

We’re a very diverse group of people but we have the common thread of connection through disability – quite often the myths and misunderstandings of disability - and so we are there for support for each other. For two hours a week we have an online oasis of belonging where we don’t have to explain who we are and we can talk freely whilst being creative.

And we want that for you – a space you can come along to find out more about us, have a natter and a cuppa, make something crafty – you don’t have to be artistic, honest. Our theme for the workshop is valuing each other and stretching out the hand of kindness – we’ll all make something really simple that we can pass on to others so that they know there is kindness in the world. You don’t need to bring anything – just yourselves. 

Online Cocktails and Mocktails Afternoon

Friday 4 August 2-3.30pm. Online Cocktails and Mocktails Afternoon for disabled women artists 
​Book through eventbrite here

ARC Workshop Dates - booking opens soon

Friday 11 August 2.00-4.00pm. Afternoon Tea Workshop (Disabled women from local communities)
Saturday 12 August 10.30am-12.00pm. Coffee Morning Workshop (learning disabled women)

Arts Depot Workshop Dates - booking opens soon

Tuesday 5 September 3.00-5.00pm.  Afternoon Tea Workshop (Disabled women from local communities)
Thursday 28 September 1.30-3.00pm.  Afternoon Tea Workshop (learning disabled women)

Artists

Michelle Baharier is an award-winning graduate of the Slade School of Fine Art and exchange student of the Städelschule Fine Art Academy in Frankfurt, Germany. She exhibits widely and her work is held in both public and private collections including digital portraits in the British Transport Museum. Sound Moves, in the Tate sound archive. Michelle is a recipient of the Glaxo Smith Kline Impact Award and the Julian Sullivan Award for ground-breaking work in the arts.
Michelle’s art addresses the many barriers that she and others face, some due to disability discrimination and prejudice. Her powerful paintings are vibrant, creating emotionally charged pieces, that encourage the viewer to have a dialogue with the images as seen in her recent highly acclaimed solo portraiture exhibition, How Do I Make You Feel?, at The Foundry Gallery in London 2023 which arose from portrait commissions from Disability Arts Online, as was her solo show in 2021 at Sprout Gallery. Michelle’s was commissioned to paint Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson and seven other Paralympic athletes for Hoxton’s art wall in 2017, with ‘Vison’ a group of learning-disabled artists.
Michelle is best known for founding CoolTan Arts, an arts and mental health charity, famous for its Largactyl Shuffle Walks of which she was the co-founder. She ran Midnight Walks that took the audience on a vivacious live performance of myth and fact, from the powerhouse to the madhouse. 
​Michelle regularly gives workshops and talks and is available for commissions.  
Michellebaharier.co.uk

Samantha Blackburn is a creative maker, producer, and presenter of outsider arts, working across multimedia including photography, textiles, embroidery, line drawing, live theatre, and music. In 2016, she founded the socially engaged arts company ‘No Label Arts’ in Lancashire, which produces accessible visual and performing arts workshops delivered for and by disabled people who would not otherwise take part in professionally-led arts within their local communities. Born in Blackpool, England, she emigrated with her family to suburban Canada in the 1970’s returning to the UK in the 1990’s.  The themes she explores in her work include: her lived experience of arthritis and perimenopause, sense of place and definitions of ‘home’ and housing inequality, stigmas associated with neurodiversity and mental illness, the social model of disability and societal inequalities/oppression against working class people, women, and LGBTQI+ people.  Samantha is proud to be exhibiting her artwork as part of the IN/Visible Disabled Women’s Art Collective.

Northern born Caroline Cardus is an artist activist in the Disability Arts Movement. Text and narrative is an important part of her work, which is often about distilling an idea down to its simplest form. Cardus works collaboratively as well as individually to tell stories of lived experience from disability and feminist perspectives. Her groundbreaking protest art piece The Way Ahead was provocatively launched on 1st October 2004 when new anti-discrimination legislation was introduced in the UK. It is now part of the National Disability Arts Collection and Archive (NDACA), and an updated version, The Way Ahead 2021 is available for hire.
Cardus was a recipient of the Adam Reynolds Memorial Bursary in 2011, where she was resident at BALTIC in Gateshead. In 2018 she worked on the LDN WMN project with the Tate Collective and in 2019 worked with Tate Modern producing an image called What Did You Think She Was Gonna Do? as part of the public poster campaign, From The Other Side.
In July 2022 Cardus took part in a nationwide DaDa intervention in galleries called We Are Invisible, We Are Visible (#WAIWAV) funded by DASH Arts. Her intervention, FED UP, was shown at Milton Keynes Gallery. Cardus also works as a creative producer, advocate and mentor for other artists.

Honor Flaherty is a disabled Irish writer, living in Leicestershire. She writes for stage and screen. She has worked in theatre, film and radio, and has a penchant for comedy and camp musicals. She is in development with her next play She’s The King, about a female Elvis impersonator. And currently writing her new play The Good Girl, about the struggles of being a young carer with Leicester’s Curve Theatre. She has a MA in TV Script Writing. She has worked with DANC, Little Cog, Theatre 503 and recently completed a Sketch Writing Comedy Lab with Soho Theatre. This is Honor’s very first visual art piece (and she’s both excited and nervous in unequalled measures!) * Weird fact about Honor is that she is a Guinness World Record Holder as one of 50 writers on a movie called 50 Kisses with London Screenwriters Festival.​

Pauline Heath is a trained actor having gained a Degree in Performing Arts in Newcastle and subsequently training and touring with Graeae Theatre Company. As part of Tyneside Disability Arts (TDA), Pauline worked on a number of productions with Get Off Our Backs Theatre Company, including the development of her idea for the play Feckless. Her poetry was published in two anthologies by Disabled writers, Sub Rosa and Transgression. Pauline was mentored by choreographer and dancer Caroline Bowditch to create a piece of physical theatre Hangin’ Around For A Man With A Pulse to open the month long disability arts Mimosa Festival in the North East. It led to cabaret and stand-up performances. She toured Scotland in Theatre Workshop Edinburgh’s production of Marat Sade; performed in the Paralympic Opening Ceremony directed by Jenny Sealey; and in the Great North Run Million Opening Ceremony directed by Bradley Hemmings. More recently Pauline crated a solo performance called NeverNeverland and her play Occupation was performed with an original music score by professional actors and a community chorus at ARC Stockton. Her visual art work has been exhibited across the country and online. Pauline was recently commissioned by the mental health charity Mind to deliver her Messages in a Bottle workshop at Peerfest in London, and she has been an access advisor on Surface Area Dance Theatre’s latest piece. 
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Cheryl Martin is a multi-award winning director, writer, performer, poet, singer and artist. A unique voice in the arts landscape, Cheryl examines subjects that many people are afraid to talk about, but approaches them with a humour, warmth, and raw honesty that draws audiences in and allows them to explore with her, fearlessly. Whether directing a writer like Alan Bissett in unearthing Scotland’s uneasy colonial history, or performing in her one-person show to reveal a personal history of hospitalisation and mental illness, she brings a lightness and wealth of imagery to create worlds audiences love to dwell in. The relationship with the audience is always key.
With vast experience in theatre over the years Cheryl directed the UK première of US-Pulitzer-Prize-winning writer Suzan-Lori Parks’ VENUS for PANDA; she has been Artistic Director of Running To Paradise; was Children’s Director of Manchester Royal Exchange’s 5 star production of A Raisin In The Sun by Lorraine Hansberry; her work as Director-in-Residence at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre included directing the first production of The Ching Room by Alan Bissett; she has been Associate Director New Writing/New Work at Contact Theatre; and has had over 20 theatre and radio plays produced. Cheryl works as a freelance artist, is co-Artistic Director of Black Gold Arts and recently became co-Artistic Director of Commonword.​

Lynne McFarlane (she/her) is an experienced poet and spoken word artist with an MA in Creative Writing from The Open University. She is a pioneer of disruptive kitchenalia and an age positive campaigner promoting age positivity in writing, performing and visual imageries. Ableism and disability terminology that seeks to define older women is rarely talked about and she is keen to open the conversation in a safe space where women can feel empowered and supported.

Julie McNamara (known to us as JulieMac) is an outspoken advocate for Disability-led cultural revolution and an award-winning writer, director, theatre and documentary filmmaker. Her work is driven by social justice and actively seeks out unheard voices from the political periphery. She is co-founder of the Disability Film Festival with Caglar Kimyoncu (1999 - 2007) and co-founder with Isobel Hawson of the Disability-led touring theatre company Vital Xposure, where she was Artistic Director until 2020. Her work has been widely produced on international stages. Recent work includes the widely toured Quiet Rebels, written and co-directed with Hassan Mahamdallie and ten years directing The Butch Monologues by Libro Levi Bridgeman. Her poetry has been widely published and is due to be included in Warriors and Saints edited by Joe Bidder and David Russell. She is currently commissioned by Greenwich and Docklands International Festival to produce A Woodland Wake for Midsummer. Her work for this exhibition represents a re-visit to her earlier passion for painting and photography.
 
JulieMac currently socializes as a human condom to model spatial integrity and the inclusion of Disabled people in social spaces.
Pronouns - She/ Her/ Sir
 

Dolly Sen has a brain of ill-repute. Because of this she is a writer, artist, performer and filmmaker.  Since 2004 she has exhibited and performed internationally. Her films have also been shown worldwide. Her journey as an artist has taken her up a tree in Regents Park, to California’s Death Row, to the Barbican, BFI, Tower Bridge, to sectioning the DWP,  and up a ladder to screw a lightbulb into the sky. Dolly’s creativity aims to put normality over her lap and slap its naughty arse. Her most recent work challenged the narrative and archives of those labelled mad in her project Birdsong from Inobservable Worlds
She is working class, Queer, interested in disability and the madness given to us by the world.  She currently resides in Norwich in Norfolk. She/They.   www.dollysen.com

Vici Wreford-Sinnott (she/her) is a writer, director and artist, whose work has taken place in person and digitally all over the world. A punk at heart, she is an artistic trickster, her work playfully transgressing, and exploding, the so-called normal, particularly around societal expectations of disabled women. Her work aims to populate the cultural world with ground-breaking disabled protagonists living life on their terms. A visual disability aesthetic is an important layer in Vici’s work, exposing and debunking commonly held myths about an economics focused world we are meant to aspire to.  Visually striking costumes in her work have included deconstructed science fiction paniers and Victorian crinoline hoops (Moll Cutpurse, Lear’s Daughters, Ironmistress), hand painted canvas costumes revealing constructions of femininity – Gilda and Lulu from her piece Deadly Devotchka created a subversive film noir style fan dance in Central Edinburgh at the Fringe in hand painted nude costumes and arse tassels. Moll Cutpurse converted audiences into tricksters as part of Dublin’s Seven Days for New Thinking at Project Arts Centre. Vici’s Mimosa Lounge Characters – strolling magicians, fortune tellers, hypnotists, snake oil sellers highlighting the obsession with ‘curing’ and eliminating disability – mill around unsuspecting audiences including 3,000 people at Sage Gateshead during the Mimosa Festival. Collaborating with Full Circle, an ensemble of learning disabled theatre makers, they made Stomping Ground, a large scale piece of satirical outdoor theatre last year for SIRF, satirically exploring their experiences of the pandemic. She is the founder of the IN/Visible Disabled Women’s National Arts Collective.