GEORGE GUNN looks back on a revealing project taking disability as its theme

THIS EXHIBITION aims to challenge the discriminations disabled people and minority groups face, and on the evidence of the eight brightly coloured and wittily painted canvases on show, Lydia Popowich is an artist who is not afraid to take the viewer to some of the darker places where prejudice lurks. All the work is a statement of intent – what it says is that prejudice is not innate; it is the manifestation of learned behaviour, of ignorance and exclusion.

Each of the pieces has a stated theme – whether it is work, education, friendship, money, etc – and each displays, whether straightforwardly or in a series of broken images, some aspect of a doll. For example in the ‘Friendship’ painting we see a female rag doll, a big-eyed marionette holding a mirror, with the sole of a huge high-heeled shoe stamping down upon her, and with two other female faces, one with a tear in her vacant eye, looking on from each side.

In another we see a clown doll alone against a pale blue background with four Hitchcockian birds swirling; or in another work there is a crash test dummy caught in the middle of some macabre dance painted against an ochre Sun.

Each painting captures, with varying degrees of success, alienation and struggle and, as the programme notes, encourages “a different way of seeing”; each piece takes you deeper into the artist’s world of what society thinks is acceptable and what it will, physically, allow.

Central to this theme of journeying is the “Disability Pursuits” game, which consists of a roulette wheel, some coloured magnets and various game squares painted onto the bottom of each painting, and a set of plastic cards with various questions and predicaments involving attitudes to disability. The game has no end, which is the artist’s point, for as yet our society has not come to terms with what it means by disability, either medically or socially.

Albeit that the game is central to the exhibition, I am not entirely convinced that it adds anything to the paintings which contain enough anger, humour and point and counter-point within their own terms of reference to need nothing extra to enhance their eloquence. Lydia Popowich is determined that we get the point. That we do is due to the central narrative so shrewdly portrayed of an artist using physical disability in order to create work which has a definite edge as well as great pathos.

Running alongside, in tandem and because of, is one of the many positive results of the visual artist Lydia Popowich’s residency at Caithness Horizons for the month of July, the work she has undertaken, with the support of Christine Russell, the Education and Community Officer for Caithness Horizons, in getting disabled, disadvantaged people to address their creativity.

This came to a conclusion on 23 July with an exhibition entitled Looking At Yourself. This consisted of 30 “books”, manufactured by the workshop participants, and hung a bit like phone directories along the wall. This was a very interesting idea in as much as it invited the viewer to look. What the “looker” looked at was an absorbing narrative of lived experience.

As the artist, Lydia Poppowich, laid out in her workshop, there were perimeters, so the people responded. The resulting works are a bit like maps. To no country, in the physical sense, but into their souls. Internalisation is one thing but the physical nature of how an individual with some handicap copes with the world is the essence of the work.

The thing to state here is that without Caithness Horizons this very moving and profound exhibition would not have happened. Lydia Popowich and Christine Russell have coaxed these experiences out of these 30 people. It is not within remit here to name names because there is just not the space, but one of the images which struck me was a rather crude drawing of a tree, on which, on each of its branches was set a question mark. It was called “The Tree of Questions”.

Art, however it is produced, is a tree of questions. Looking at yourself is never easy. These 30 brave souls looked hard. The results were often hilarious, sometimes shocking, but overall they were like a map. In the form of collage, these were assemblages of how people interpret reality. How they go to sea on the ship of their lives.

This subjective viewpoint, times 30, conjures up a rough collective and the message is if you are disabled or disadvantaged, this society is tough. You have to be strong to survive. Art, if it is anything, is a revelation. This work was revealing. It was like Andy Warhol meeting the Thurso Co-op.

Caithness Horizons have done good stuff here. In the future they must be encouraged to do more. The creativity of ordinary people is what art is. Before this process the 30 folk involved probably didn’t know what was in them. They know and we know now. The hundred or so people who came to the exhibition last Friday certainly, by the time they left, knew. It was a beautiful thing with a purpose.

As an arts venue Caithness Horizons is a place to watch. But more importantly it is a place to be. There will be more from this Caithness factory soon.

Funding for the project came from Awards for All Scotland.

© George Gunn, 2010

Links

•  Caithness Horizons