Rising in Our Power Limited Edition Zine
The artwork from which was shared in a pop-up exhibition in MIMA's atrium 4-8 February 2025
The artwork from which was shared in a pop-up exhibition in MIMA's atrium 4-8 February 2025
There is very little published material about disabled women artists, and about their approaches to activism, and yet there is a 50-60 year history of Disability Arts in the UK. Most of the publication of work by disabled artists has been created within the disability arts community. It remains viewed as a niche area of the arts despite its relevance to over 25% of the population, and the cultural value the work holds in its broadest sense. Disabled people are not a minority group but a minoritised section of society, causing the work to be viewed as 'less than' and 'other' due to the tacit biases held within both society and the arts. The IN/Visible National Disabled Women's Arts Collective created this zine with immense pride as a celebration of the voices of disabled women artists at a variety of intersections, all with very different experiences and perspectives but with a solidarity around having been neglected in art and culture.
Samantha Blackburn
Samantha Blackburn
For All Our Elizabeths (2025)
Photography and Mixed Media - dried flowers, textiles, cork, ink, paper, 19th Century lace and porcelain.
For All Our Elizabeths (2025)
Photography and Mixed Media - dried flowers, textiles, cork, ink, paper, 19th Century lace and porcelain.
My image captures a montage/tableau I created representing aspects of my chosen woman of power’s life and struggles in late 19th Century America - she who continues to inspire women today: Elizabeth Parsons Ware Packard. A social reformer, feminist, involuntary mental asylum inmate, successful 19th Century crowdfunder and self-published author of her own and fellow women’s experiences whilst incarcerated in Jacksonville, Illinois’ state mental hospital.
The tableau features symbolic objects which relate back to Elizabeth’s story. These include 19th Century lace trimmings which I sewed into my performance costume – fashion items popular during her time; also a vintage bridal veil alluding to her catastrophic marriage which led to her husband incarcerating Elizabeth.
A reproduced photographic image of Elizabeth shows her gold pocket watch - gifted by fellow women, it was one of her most cherished belongings. An actual a gold-coloured pocket watch is included in the montage - this formed part of my costume for the MIMA performance where I performed a monologue based on some of Elizabeth’s experiences. A reproduced drawn image of the hospital where she was imprisoned and the front cover of one of Elizabeth’s publications: ‘The Prisoner’s Hidden Life, Insane Asylums Revealed…’ also appear in the montage.
Dried flowers represent memories Elizabeth would reflect upon whilst imprisoned: her home with its well-tended kitchen garden and her beloved furniture pieces represented with a doll house sized bureau and child’s rocking horse – Elizabeth’s six children were denied their mother during her time at Illinois hospital. The flowers also allude to historical misogynistic tropes against menopausal women; described as withered and dried beings, past their full ‘bloom.’
Elizabeth wrote messages on scraps of paper and cloth she could find whilst in the sewing room and donated by sympathetic staff – I’ve included the embroidered words ‘I must defend myself’ referring to her ‘smuggling’ her messages out of the asylum through willing allies.
Scraps of fabric on the montage contain inked Letraset messages – mental health survival tools: ‘peer support, advocacy’ and ‘write it out’ – write out your strife.
The tableau features symbolic objects which relate back to Elizabeth’s story. These include 19th Century lace trimmings which I sewed into my performance costume – fashion items popular during her time; also a vintage bridal veil alluding to her catastrophic marriage which led to her husband incarcerating Elizabeth.
A reproduced photographic image of Elizabeth shows her gold pocket watch - gifted by fellow women, it was one of her most cherished belongings. An actual a gold-coloured pocket watch is included in the montage - this formed part of my costume for the MIMA performance where I performed a monologue based on some of Elizabeth’s experiences. A reproduced drawn image of the hospital where she was imprisoned and the front cover of one of Elizabeth’s publications: ‘The Prisoner’s Hidden Life, Insane Asylums Revealed…’ also appear in the montage.
Dried flowers represent memories Elizabeth would reflect upon whilst imprisoned: her home with its well-tended kitchen garden and her beloved furniture pieces represented with a doll house sized bureau and child’s rocking horse – Elizabeth’s six children were denied their mother during her time at Illinois hospital. The flowers also allude to historical misogynistic tropes against menopausal women; described as withered and dried beings, past their full ‘bloom.’
Elizabeth wrote messages on scraps of paper and cloth she could find whilst in the sewing room and donated by sympathetic staff – I’ve included the embroidered words ‘I must defend myself’ referring to her ‘smuggling’ her messages out of the asylum through willing allies.
Scraps of fabric on the montage contain inked Letraset messages – mental health survival tools: ‘peer support, advocacy’ and ‘write it out’ – write out your strife.
Caroline Cardus
Caroline Cardus
My Activist Heart (2025)
Digital Print
My Activist Heart (2025)
Digital Print
My Activist Heart
Against a pale green and yellow background a set of alternate black and red symbols are placed symmetrically on the page. From the top tears are falling, then to the right and left sides, linked cog shapes with designs at their centre; a broken heart, a key, a fist raised in solidarity. Underneath a pair of red eyes says ‘anger was my engine, the tears fell inwards and watered my activist heart’ towards the bottom third of the image two walking sticks hang over two phrases; the left phrase reads ‘make the space’ the right phrase reads ‘lead the space’.
Against a pale green and yellow background a set of alternate black and red symbols are placed symmetrically on the page. From the top tears are falling, then to the right and left sides, linked cog shapes with designs at their centre; a broken heart, a key, a fist raised in solidarity. Underneath a pair of red eyes says ‘anger was my engine, the tears fell inwards and watered my activist heart’ towards the bottom third of the image two walking sticks hang over two phrases; the left phrase reads ‘make the space’ the right phrase reads ‘lead the space’.
JulieMc McNamara
JulieMc McNamara
Red in my veins: Mapping my pathway to activism: 1970 to 2024 (2025)
Photograph of a mixed media collage
Red in my veins: Mapping my pathway to activism: 1970 to 2024 (2025)
Photograph of a mixed media collage
RED IN MY VEINS: Mapping my pathway to activism
A collage of snapshots of incidents on the road to activism from 1970 to 2024.
At ten years of age, I was so outraged, I started a strike with my mate, Glenda Owen. Girls were obliged to complete two sessions of Maths whilst the boys were taught the rules of football on the playing field. We made it into the local press and changed our world overnight. I read that Ellen Wilkinson, who was once a much lauded MP for Middlesbrough, was ten when she won school prizes for her debating skills at school. I'd failed my spoken English. But I knew from my father how to manage a strike. He was a Shop Steward in the shipping yard at Cammell Lairds.
Fast forward 50+ years later, I was given an under the counter copy of Laura Beers' book: 'Red Ellen Wilkinson...' a draft copy stamped 'Not for Sale'. Nobody said anything about stealing it though. It's a great book, meticulously researched and full of anecdotes that lend themselves to live storytelling - perfect for the MIMA takeover. That book began my process in Middlesbrough. I then set off to chat to women I met in the community - at the Hotel Inn, behind the bar, cleaning the gallery, cleaning the streets and women on the front line reception at Teesside University. Everybody had a story. And I was astonished when I heard of Red Ellen, and how she was quietly forgotten during lockdown, after a democratic vote in Middlesbrough had agreed she should have a statue in her honour, in Middlesbrough's town centre. It has still not been installed. She was robbed!
My collage of images highlights significant moments in my life as an artist staging creative activism. These are all images that reflect past work and past moments on the frontline. There is a Charge sheet from an arrest, that was a side-swipe from a 'Section 136'. (Detention under the Mental Health Act). Another for a 'Detained person' both informed a mock-up of Kafka's trial when I was assessed and given the 'Guilty' verdict by Rachel High, my long-time collaborator, and superb artist with a learning disability. There are images from the first Disability film festival in London, an image from Pig Tales, my first theatre commission from Oval House and Jackson's Lane and a warning about 'Foot and Mouth disease', something my father had always warned me about on the frontline. The journey across the collage, mimics my journey across the courtyard to MIMA, following the sculptural maps of the Iron industry carved into the pathway to the entrance. I lay down across the photocopies sketched on display as colouring charts for visitors in the collections gallery on the top floor. I traced my walk to MIMA, following the iron sculpture that represents the industry at the heart of the North East and drew RED around the map of my body across the designs intended for the visitors to colour in. I have RED in my veins.I am a Disabled Queer woman in an ageing stigmatized body. This is a scene of crime. This body, this site, in this country today, where our rights are being eroded daily, and in plain sight.
This country is the first to have been investigated by the commission for People with Disabilities in the UN, for its 'catastrophic treatment of Disabled citizens'. Read the report, published in 2017, re-visited in March 2024. And our government remains silent in response.
THIS IS A CLEAR ABUSE OF POWER.
A collage of snapshots of incidents on the road to activism from 1970 to 2024.
At ten years of age, I was so outraged, I started a strike with my mate, Glenda Owen. Girls were obliged to complete two sessions of Maths whilst the boys were taught the rules of football on the playing field. We made it into the local press and changed our world overnight. I read that Ellen Wilkinson, who was once a much lauded MP for Middlesbrough, was ten when she won school prizes for her debating skills at school. I'd failed my spoken English. But I knew from my father how to manage a strike. He was a Shop Steward in the shipping yard at Cammell Lairds.
Fast forward 50+ years later, I was given an under the counter copy of Laura Beers' book: 'Red Ellen Wilkinson...' a draft copy stamped 'Not for Sale'. Nobody said anything about stealing it though. It's a great book, meticulously researched and full of anecdotes that lend themselves to live storytelling - perfect for the MIMA takeover. That book began my process in Middlesbrough. I then set off to chat to women I met in the community - at the Hotel Inn, behind the bar, cleaning the gallery, cleaning the streets and women on the front line reception at Teesside University. Everybody had a story. And I was astonished when I heard of Red Ellen, and how she was quietly forgotten during lockdown, after a democratic vote in Middlesbrough had agreed she should have a statue in her honour, in Middlesbrough's town centre. It has still not been installed. She was robbed!
My collage of images highlights significant moments in my life as an artist staging creative activism. These are all images that reflect past work and past moments on the frontline. There is a Charge sheet from an arrest, that was a side-swipe from a 'Section 136'. (Detention under the Mental Health Act). Another for a 'Detained person' both informed a mock-up of Kafka's trial when I was assessed and given the 'Guilty' verdict by Rachel High, my long-time collaborator, and superb artist with a learning disability. There are images from the first Disability film festival in London, an image from Pig Tales, my first theatre commission from Oval House and Jackson's Lane and a warning about 'Foot and Mouth disease', something my father had always warned me about on the frontline. The journey across the collage, mimics my journey across the courtyard to MIMA, following the sculptural maps of the Iron industry carved into the pathway to the entrance. I lay down across the photocopies sketched on display as colouring charts for visitors in the collections gallery on the top floor. I traced my walk to MIMA, following the iron sculpture that represents the industry at the heart of the North East and drew RED around the map of my body across the designs intended for the visitors to colour in. I have RED in my veins.I am a Disabled Queer woman in an ageing stigmatized body. This is a scene of crime. This body, this site, in this country today, where our rights are being eroded daily, and in plain sight.
This country is the first to have been investigated by the commission for People with Disabilities in the UN, for its 'catastrophic treatment of Disabled citizens'. Read the report, published in 2017, re-visited in March 2024. And our government remains silent in response.
THIS IS A CLEAR ABUSE OF POWER.
Dolly Sen
UNFAIRFIX
FAIRFIX
Dolly Sen
Un/Fair Fix (2025)
Mixed media and photograph
Un/Fair Fix (2025)
Mixed media and photograph
My artwork is subverting an Airfix kit to show an unfair system and a system where women take control of light and life.
Lynne McFarlane - Pop-Up Exhibition Piece
The original art I presented at MIMA is a scarlet hand-knitted scarf with integrated pockets decorated with intarsia white hearts. My art features over 30,000 stitches and 14 hours work and constitutes a time-intensive act of care. The more I knit the more I want to simplify the construction of the stitches I use as I want my technique to be close to perfect, all ends sewn in, all stitches uniform. I like the familiar and comforting feel of textiles that comes from the integral and basic part they play in our lives. My passion is to present craft as art, and to explore ideas of community, care, protest, repair, love, change and comfort. I ponder the possibility I can alter the world with my domestic skills. My tribe, the work of many hands, joined to form a seamless whole. I’m changing the world one stitch at a time.
Lynne McFarlane
Wearable Art is the Best Art (2025)
Knitted scarf in red and white wool
Wearable Art is the Best Art (2025)
Knitted scarf in red and white wool
Vici Wreford-Sinnott
Vici Wreford-Sinnott
Finding My Tribe (2025)
Digital print containing tartan fabric, kilt pins and torn paper
Finding My Tribe (2025)
Digital print containing tartan fabric, kilt pins and torn paper
Punk and Me
I caught the tail end of the punk movement in the early 1980s. It was the first time I had ventured outside the norms of my family and the village I grew up in. A few local young people had embraced punk and I couldn’t wait to get involved.
The clothes were the first thing –a statement staking a claim to belong. They were like theatrical costumes, and I loved a good parade – the tartans, the leather, studs, spiky hair and pointy boots.
Punk was a complex movement with all sorts of factions within it, but it became my first community. People with things in common, asking big questions of society, and not taking everything at face value. Ever since my punk days, I learned to take nothing at face value but to always ask, in whose interests is information being presented in this way. It’s where I learned about propaganda and how governments control society along with our beliefs and behaviours.
Don’t get me wrong, punk was also a big party – amazing bands, nights out, singing in unison in a wave of joyful power. And that was part of its appeal. I wasn’t interested in the violence of punk but the fact that it pulled in so many different types of people.
Punk became a home for many disabled people under subversive banners of misfits and outsiders. Many leading disabled artists and activists also had their beginnings in punk – Mat Fraser, Simon McKeown, Kaite O’Reilly, Ian Dury, and Karen Sheader to name just a few. If you don’t recognize their name – do look them up.
Through the irreverent and subversive sensibility of punk I discovered feminism, socialism, ‘alternative’ comedy and disability rights – all of these movements are about people: supportive communities uniting and using their voice when they need to. We need community voices to hold councils and governments to account.
From punk I became an activist and discovered incredible theatre. A life changing moment for me – who didn’t have theatre in her life as a kid growing up in the East Durham coalfields – was seeing Steven Berkoff’s Metamorphosis starring Tim Roth, in the early 80s in London, discovered by chance in an underground club in London and it sealed my artistic fate as wanting to bring about change using exciting theatre working with my tribe.
I caught the tail end of the punk movement in the early 1980s. It was the first time I had ventured outside the norms of my family and the village I grew up in. A few local young people had embraced punk and I couldn’t wait to get involved.
The clothes were the first thing –a statement staking a claim to belong. They were like theatrical costumes, and I loved a good parade – the tartans, the leather, studs, spiky hair and pointy boots.
Punk was a complex movement with all sorts of factions within it, but it became my first community. People with things in common, asking big questions of society, and not taking everything at face value. Ever since my punk days, I learned to take nothing at face value but to always ask, in whose interests is information being presented in this way. It’s where I learned about propaganda and how governments control society along with our beliefs and behaviours.
Don’t get me wrong, punk was also a big party – amazing bands, nights out, singing in unison in a wave of joyful power. And that was part of its appeal. I wasn’t interested in the violence of punk but the fact that it pulled in so many different types of people.
Punk became a home for many disabled people under subversive banners of misfits and outsiders. Many leading disabled artists and activists also had their beginnings in punk – Mat Fraser, Simon McKeown, Kaite O’Reilly, Ian Dury, and Karen Sheader to name just a few. If you don’t recognize their name – do look them up.
Through the irreverent and subversive sensibility of punk I discovered feminism, socialism, ‘alternative’ comedy and disability rights – all of these movements are about people: supportive communities uniting and using their voice when they need to. We need community voices to hold councils and governments to account.
From punk I became an activist and discovered incredible theatre. A life changing moment for me – who didn’t have theatre in her life as a kid growing up in the East Durham coalfields – was seeing Steven Berkoff’s Metamorphosis starring Tim Roth, in the early 80s in London, discovered by chance in an underground club in London and it sealed my artistic fate as wanting to bring about change using exciting theatre working with my tribe.
Honor Flaherty
Revolutionary Embroidery
A round wooden embroidery frame, with the stitched slogan ‘SMASH THE PATRIARCHY’ stitched into cloth in pink cerise pink against a marbled pink background. Surrounding the slogan there are two garlands of colourful flowers, top and bottom, in deep reds, green, purple, and touches of yellows.
A round wooden embroidery frame, with the motivational slogan ‘LET THEM HEAR YOU ROAR’ stitched in yellow against a blue marbled background with diamond shaped detailing in yellow and blue surrounding the slogan.
A round wooden embroidery frame, with the stitched slogan ‘SMASH THE PATRIARCHY’ stitched into cloth in pink cerise pink against a marbled pink background. Surrounding the slogan there are two garlands of colourful flowers, top and bottom, in deep reds, green, purple, and touches of yellows.
A round wooden embroidery frame, with the motivational slogan ‘LET THEM HEAR YOU ROAR’ stitched in yellow against a blue marbled background with diamond shaped detailing in yellow and blue surrounding the slogan.
Michelle Baharier
Michelle Baharier
What shaped you? Here’s some of me (2025)
Acrylic painting and digital print collage
What shaped you? Here’s some of me (2025)
Acrylic painting and digital print collage
My piece for the pop-up exhibition was the same as in the Zine: it was a digital drawing with important statements about my life. My aim is to invite the viewer to be reminded of important moments in their lives, be it the opinions/observations of others, and our response to them, which builds who we become.
Pauline Heath
Pauline Heath
The Lost Travellers (2025)
Poetry text and enhanced digital print
The Lost Travellers (2025)
Poetry text and enhanced digital print
