Sue Austin: Deep Sea Diving in a Wheelchair
When Sue Austin got a power chair 16 years ago, she felt a tremendous sense of freedom, yet others looked at her as though she had lost something. In her art, she aims to convey the spirit of wonder she feels wheeling through the world. Her talk includes thrilling footage of an underwater wheelchair that lets her explore ocean beds, drifting through schools of fish, floating free in 360 degrees.
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ABOUT Sue Austin
“Multimedia, performance and installation artist Sue Austin keeps a fascinating mission at the centre of her work: to challenge the idea of disabled as ‘other’ and represent her experience as a wheelchair-user in a brighter light.
She does this by creating quirky, unexpected juxtapositions, bringing a sense of whimsy and empowerment to the discussion of disability. She is the Founder and Artistic Director of ‘Freewheeling’, an initiative aimed at furthering the genre of Disability Arts.
In 2012, she was asked to be a part of the Cultural Olympiad in Britain, a celebration of the arts leading up to the Olympic and Paralympic Games. The work she created for the event, called ‘Creating the Spectacle!’, is a ground breaking series of live art and video works of an underwater wheelchair.
The VIDEO
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