Arts & Culture
Enabling acts
Published 08 January 1999
Hugh Aldersey-Williamslooks at new designs for the disabled, while John Henshall views the work of a community of artists with learning difficulties
I don't suppose I was the only one to wish myself briefly deaf during the 1997 election campaign. It wasn't just the usual negative reaction to hearing the platitudes of the party political broadcasts. This was a positive desire: the empty promises suddenly looked so exciting in the versions of the broadcasts with signing, a language of such expressive power that dance companies are exploring its possibilities.
The ultimate challenge of meeting the needs of disabled people is to return to them ability in such measure as everybody might want. It can be just a matter of perception. Some worthy programme on Radio 4 the other day described synaesthesia as a disability. It sounds like one, but this capacity - to associate words or sounds with colours, which is possessed by some painters and composers - sounds like an advantage to me.
More often, it takes a dramatic gesture to show the potential. The September issue of Dazed and Confused magazine, guest-edited by the fashion designer Alexander McQueen, featured the model Aimee Mullins, whose legs were amputated below the knee in infancy because she was born without fibulas. She had not one pair of prosthetic legs, but several. On cervine carbon-fibre pins, she is a paralympic runner. She has pairs for swimming, windsurfing and parachuting, the last with shock absorbers. Although the designs of Mullins's various prostheses are striking, their paradoxical effect is to ensure that her disability is not the first thing people notice about her. Making further mockery of her disability, her "social" legs are a couple of inches longer than her real ones would have been. "Differently abled" is not a happy euphemism even by the low standards of the politically correct phrase book, but in innovations like these the term gains real meaning.
For the vast majority of Britain's four million physically disabled, the options are more limited - and limiting. It has been the pattern that assistive products have been designed from a medically defined need. This sounds right and good, but what it often means is that everything beyond function is forgotten. The graceless designs that result are often no more cruel than an advertisement for the disability they are supposed to ameliorate. If they lie neglected as a consequence, then the user's sense of isolation is merely increased and the scant resources that were given over to their creation have gone to waste. "Something is only functional if people use it for its function," as the MP Anne Begg points out.
Ironically, the historical obligation of local authorities to arrange for the provision of equipment has probably exacerbated the situation. Without a free market, improved design cannot compete alongside standard products, and people cannot make the ordinary consumer choices available in every other area, including the crucial one of balancing quality and price.
New efforts to design products for the disabled try to see things from the consumer's point of view. I would normally incline to give short shrift to any appeal to "lifestyle". But here, the word has a long way to go before it becomes the dead letter it is in most areas of life. Begg makes her lifestyle statement with a gold-plated wheelchair, for use on formal occasions; Mullins does it with her interchangeable legs. Now Design for Ability, an initiative undertaken by Central St Martin's College of Art and Design, hopes to make such desirable products more widely available. Designers working for the disabled should not settle for minimum enablement but seek to lower the threshold for active participation in society, according to its director, Malcolm Johnston.
One problem has been the volume of the market. There may be four million Britons with disabilities, but they are not a lumpen mass. They have very different needs. Design for Ability's survey of 600 disabled people showed that they have different wishes, too. Disabled people may be usefully segmented not according to the nature of the disability but into consumer categories.
Global competition and the advent of "mass customisation" in manufacturing should gradually improve the supply of suitable and attractive products. The Design for Ability programme has gone further than most design school disability projects by attracting household brand names such as Morphy Richards and Hotpoint. If these manufacturers begin making products for the disabled and if retailers such as Tesco, another company interested in Design for Ability, begin selling them, it will be an important step towards greater quality and choice and away from the prejudice institutionalised by special suppliers and their special shops of horrors. It may be a hard step to take, however. There is a perverse instinct to cherish that restricted supply route, not least because it was a hard-won privilege in the first place.
On the demand side, people must be shown that there are greater possibilities and they must be allowed to choose between them. Since 1997 there has been the legislative provision for vouchers so that people may purchase a few articles of their own choice, but few authorities have introduced the scheme. Meanwhile, there is increasing scrutiny of disability benefit claimants' eligibility, which in practice can mean that individuals get less help. "Some authorities are not providing bathing equipment since they consider bathing non-essential," says Judith Payling, a former county council head of occupational therapy who conducted the Design for Ability research.
As a demonstration of the sort of thing its research data might lead to, Design for Ability asked the product design company Tangerine to take a second look at the ubiquitous but unlovely zimmer frame. Its Activ walking frame looks better, and has additional utility, with castors, soft handle grips and a wood veneer tray. Just because it addresses "special needs" does not mean that other considerations have been forgotten. Storage of unsightly aids is a particular bugbear with disabled people, so the Activ frame, unlike the zimmer, can be folded away when not in use.
In many cases, better design for groups with "special needs" could benefit us all. A building with access for the disabled becomes easier for the elderly, for children, for everybody. We all gain if product packaging is easier to open, even if the improved design was conceived with disabled people in mind. At its best, so called "universal design" - currently the subject of an exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York - can lead one to wonder why we made things so difficult for ourselves before.
Jonathan Plumb is artist provocateur and gallery curator at one of Europe's few truly successful "outsider art" communities - Barrington Farm, a windswept settlement just a mile inland from the wild North Sea at tiny Walcott, high on the Norfolk coast. The gallery is St Brannocks in sedate Mundesley nearby. Plumb's work combines the joy of seeing fine, self-taught art flourish with a certain frustration. "I can do without people coming in, looking at it and saying: 'But is it proper art?' What's that when it's at home for God's sake?"
Barrington Farm and the Rookery residential centre have flourished for 15 years now. They are home to a growing group of painters, sculptors and ceramicists with various learning difficulties. At least eight artists are regular exhibitors at St Brannocks and at galleries in Norwich and London. Several have works with the British Outsider Archive, currently decamped to Dublin, and in many private collections worldwide. One artist now has American representation.
The strongest talents include Leofric Baron, Michael Smith, Barbara Symmons and Roy Colinson. They make brash, raw, sometimes unsettling art which erupts from the soul itself. They have no formal training but thrive in the quietly frenetic art centre at Barrington Farm, where Plumb and two colleagues try to encourage and enable, rather than instruct and impose.
The Barrington Farm artists are long-term residents, mainly referred by social services. They live with mental difficulties such as autism, schizophrenia, epilepsy and its complications, cerebral palsy and Down's syndrome. Plumb stresses: "They've dealt with their conditions since birth. I'm aware that by their definitions of normality, they're just like anybody else."
The farm developed into an artistic centre because the residents made it do so. There is a parallel with the occupational therapy sessions of the sprawling sanatoria of an older Eastern Europe, where outsider art was initially "identified". Plumb explains: "Art has certainly become a big thing here. There's no question of forcing residents to do it, but it was thought that creative expression could be a way to help them develop sustainable interests, then keep their concentration. The fact that this art is now being shown widely in galleries is a marvellous bonus."
Many people have tried to define this art and it wears many labels: outsider, naive, primitive, intuitive and visionary art. Psychiatrists such as Dr Hans Prinzhorn were among the first to identify outsider art as something of importance and consistency. Prinzhorn's occupational therapies at the psychiatric clinic at the University of Heidelberg, where he amassed a collection of some 5,000 outsider works, convinced him that he was dealing with ready fledged, casual savants.
Cultural commentators followed his lead. The French artist and critic Jean Dubuffet called this "new" art "l'art brut " - raw art which had not been cooked by bourgeois preconception and prejudice. The American poet and art critic Jonathon Williams defined it as "a series of art movements with one member each".
Ultimately, outsider art has always been here, but its dispossessed, unconventional protagonists have generally been excluded from society. They have only been listened to and taken seriously as artists and people during the past six or seven decades.
Jonathan Plumb arrived at lost, lonely Barrington Farm from Northampton to manage the art centre. He then went to Winchester to do an MA in sculpture. "I'd barely finished when they asked me if I'd come back and set up St Brannocks. I was on my way at once."
St Brannocks surprises you as you enter a faintly sombre Victorian building in Mundesley, a model town perched precariously on cliffs at the most north-easterly point of unruly East Anglia, where winds roar ashore from the Baltic and beyond.
There are two large, white, airy exhibition spaces. When I was there just before the new year, the Barrington Farm Christmas exhibition was under way. Comments in the visitor's book included: "This is great, keep it up"; "Quite marvellous"; and "I never knew art could be this real!"
Star turn Leofric Baron was there with us. An epileptic, he's a slight, shy man with wire-rimmed glasses who starts to expatiate once he feels at ease. He said of one of his vivid cacophonic paintings: "It's like a movie or a cartoon. I start and everything that's in my head goes in there."
Baron had four arresting portraits on show: Pope John II: the red angry faces of a man on a green hat of a day (in inks and acrylic). These images were animated, leering and cajoling. Michael Smith had an untitled picture of a nightmarish, squat figure on the rampage.
James Gladwell showed a stunning painting of a turkey cocking his tail, all clever, clashing colours. Barbara Symmons' Bird Landscape incorporated tapestry which used wool from the Barrington Farm sheep. Maria Wicko had made ceramics that chic London galleries would covet.
In the art centre's lounge area, exotic finches bounce and squawk. Somewhere in the scuddy mist outside, a small menagerie exists. As we drove up to Mundesley we passed the Lighthouse pub, the artists' local. We tracked the beach by just 50 yards, but the wall of fog kept the sea invisible.
Plumb encounters barriers: "You still get people who can't quite see what these artists are doing, that art can be so much part of everyday life. They get cagey and seem to think there's some hidden agenda or that we're playing a trick on them."
I suggest he fortify himself with the thought that, formal training or not, the Barrington Farm gang are out in front and show no sign of relinquishing their position. They're making some of the most original art you will find in this country today. As Leofric Baron coolly put it: "With paint I can make a violin into a whale."
St Brannocks Gallery, Mundesley, Norfolk. Open Sunday and Monday 11am-8pm and by appointment. Prices £30-£500. Telephone: 01263-722622
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