Arriving at the Lowry on a characteristically rainy Friday evening, my bones ache. It’s been a week. I’ve been having a terrible time with my chronic illnesses and, despite my body’s protestations, found no time to rest. At the time of arrival, my blood sugars are 20 (the normal range for a non-diabetic being between 4 and 7). ‘At least it’ll put me in the mood for the performance’, I feebly and sardonically tell myself. I’m not advocating for you to ignore your needs and press ahead – whether it be with work or a cool art show or, in my case, both, but the beauty of The Severed Wing made me wholly glad that I persevered.
Both performance and self-portrait, The Severed Wing is the work of artist Corinne, and was originally performed in May 2024 at one of the Lowry’s inaugural scratch nights – a place for emerging artists to trial new work for feedback and development. Whilst scratch nights are a traditionally in-person affair, Corinne’s piece was performed remotely and broadcast via Zoom. They have been confined to their 2-by-1.5 metre bed for the past six years. As Corinne explains in the post-show talk, their bed is not merely a bed, it’s their ‘whole world’: their art studio, their place of rest, eating, interaction, living. This inseparability permeates the piece with stark resonance for anybody who has ever had to take time out on account of their disability.
Where most people (particularly those bound to the norms of in-person working that are in fact inaccessible to many) would see Corinne’s confinement as an insurmountable challenge, the Lowry’s team of Zoe Watson (Contemporary Curator), Antonia Beck (Senior Producer: Artistic Development), and Grace Ng (Artist Development and Access Producer), were committed to making this performance possible, enabling Corinne to share their experiences and have an artistic platform. In turn, they explain that this has enabled them to innovate both artistic and audience experience, using technology and audiovisual software to facilitate new and interesting relationships between the two – indeed, redefining what a gallery or performance space can look like.
Settling into the theatre space, I notice a quiet hum, a chatter. Looking around, I see a large screen with a Zoom feed ready to go, with a spotlight casting silhouettes of small birds onto the floor in front. I take a moment to appreciate this clever touch, which shows Corinne’s understanding of what the audience can experience in their immediate surroundings rather than just through the projection of Corinne’s screen. In this way, the distance between Corinne and the audience feels that bit smaller. Looking around the room, I’m filled with mixed feelings. On the one hand, turnout is pretty good, and there are so many people in the room who I either know or recognise from Manchester’s disabled communities. On the other hand, I can’t help but feel a little sad for some of the empty seats. While I knew there would be people in the room who would, hopefully, see themselves in this piece (the audience Q&A later proving this to be the case), I wonder how many people in the space do not consider themselves to be disabled, and what they would take away from this piece by contrast.
The title and context of each act is heralded by the methodical tapping of a typewriter. Fading into Act One, entitled ‘Twenty to Nine’ (the vague, thereabouts moment that Corinne noticed the weight and duration of their six year-long confinement – because after all, what is time when you’re bedbound?), the audience sees a photograph of a crumpled, white quilt, softly illuminated. We hear birdsong fill the room.
Corinne’s face appears onscreen, framed by an oval border of lace and surrounded by a square of blue tarp-like material. A red thread is pulled slowly by a mysterious, seemingly disembodied hand. It is tugged laboriously through the eyelets lining the perimeter of the tarp, running across Corinne’s face – slowly making one line, then another. On the third eyelet, Corinne’s eyes open – they are alert, teary and red as the reality of their confinement reaches them. A droning ambient soundscape enhances this feeling of dread; the realisation that ‘this is it, this is my life now’. A ticking clock in the background calls to mind a constant awareness of the passage of time. The world around Corinne moves, but they stay bedbound. This binding of the red thread feels slow, deliberate, painstaking – unfair. It calls to mind the lack of freedom afforded to disabled people in defining the boundaries of time for themselves. Alison Kafer, in Feminist, Queer, Crip (2013), terms this ‘crip time’: a warped, fragmented understanding of time as dictated by crip bodies and minds. As they write,‘rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds’.
As act two begins, entitled ‘At Rest’, the tip-tap of the typewriter materialises a quote about the frustration of Corinne’s pillow being ‘contoured perfectly to the permanent impression’ of their head on the bed. There is intimacy. The background of the plain, crumpled white quilt makes me feel safe and cosy. It makes me think about how easy it is for people not bedbound, myself included, to romanticise the aesthetic (think 2010s Tumblr) of crumpled bedsheets and dappled light, always able to maintain a degree of distance to them: this is the site I will return to, later. Whereas, for Corinne, this is a source of distress.
The phantom hand reappears: is it Corinne’s? Somebody else’s? The hand grasps a blue makeup crayon, adorning Corinne’s eyes with pigment. Another crayon, a more greenish-blue, pokes at Corinne’s eyes. They look uncomfortable; the crayon jabs at their eyes quite harshly in moments. The process repeats with lipstick, which continually misses Corinne’s mouth and smears across the boundaries of their lips. For me, this feels like a subtle way to convey the reality that Corinne needs others to help them complete tasks like putting on makeup, a form of self-definition, in order to conceive of their appearance. In a post-show ‘behind the scenes’ feature, we learn that the floating hand is that of Corinne’s partner, collaborator, and access support worker, Stephen. It is a stark reminder of the necessity of support networks required by disabled people, something that Corinne describes as being initially begrudging to accept, but later realising that accepting help just gives you ‘more time’, gives you crip time. The freneticism of the scene is contrasted with a backing soundscape of tedium, i.e., a dripping tap. While grating and hard to dismiss, the audience comes to realise that this is indeed the point; Corinne’s daily reality is likely composed of annoying sounds that they aren’t able to do anything about.
Act Three begins with a quote: ‘If luck was on my side, I would have been born a bird.’ Entitled ‘In Memoriam’, this act is a stunning testament to Corinne’s father and grandfather, both of whom they lost within a short space of each other. I later learn that it is Corinne’s father who penned the quote, and this avian affinity is something that they have carried through to conceptualise their own disablement. Birds, as migratory creatures, are testaments of freedom. We think of them as synonymous with flight, escape, glorious movement with no limits but the sky above and ground below. Calling this to mind, we are invited to ask ourselves: if you could go anywhere, where would you go?
For Corinne, the answer is represented in The Severed Wing by a small door fashioned out of paper, which resides on their forehead. We are later told that this represents Corinne’s childhood escape of ‘Daisyland’, a magical realm inhabited by their childhood imaginary friend, Daisy, whom Corinne poses as in other artworks. These explanations in the post-show feature give additional richness and layers of lore. They make me feel that the artistry of Corinne’s work lies not solely in their performance, but the way they wish to communicate this with you and invite you into their own private world, into Daisyland. While arguably didactic and perhaps divisive, I appreciated this explanation for what it was: a touching attempt to transport the audience into Corinne’s realm, transcending physical distance.
With allusions to Daisyland and the desire to fly away as a bird, we are abruptly brought back to Corinne’s reality through the heavy, steady beat of what sounds like cogs winding, or something mechanical. A yellow string of beads appears under Corinne’s eyes, pearlescent tears that indicate the carving of beauty out of painful experience. As the mechanical thrums and thuds fill my ears and I transfix upon Corinne crying tears of gems, I write ‘this is what it feels like when I think about my body’. There is a claustrophobia, a hyperconsciousness around the body as a series of machinations – its workings and not-workings. Ultimately, having to consider the myriad ways in which my body does not work as it should is painful, and I felt profoundly connected to Corinne in that moment, despite our realities and surroundings being cities apart.
This claustrophobia continues into the second part of the act, wherein a candle hovers below Corinne’s framed face. The candle moves frenetically, never staying in one position too long, as though taunting a stressed Corinne, who desperately tries to blow the candle out. Their breath doesn’t quite reach far enough. The candle flickers and its flame bends once more. I feel anguish. Eventually, the candle is blown out in a split second. Gone.
Corinne’s explanation of this vignette is that it mimics their father’s funeral, in which everybody lit and blew a candle out to celebrate Corinne’s father’s life. Corinne, weak but determined, was frustrated at being unable to blow their candle out. I see two frustrations here: firstly, at your body, for betraying you in a moment you need it to cooperate the most, and, secondly, at a larger or vaguer sense of being unable to grieve and process grief in a way that is actually accessible to you. Corinne’s anguish highlights the ways in which the people around us, even those we love and hold dear – and who ultimately mean well – can hold us back from experiencing the world in our own time and space.
As we move into act four, the eponymous ‘Severed Wing’, Corinne proudly and defiantly explains: ‘I escaped my confinement and transformed into my true self.’ The scene opens with a lace blindfold over Corinne’s eyes, which subsequently drops. Now, they see. The world is open to them. They have wings, which flutter fluidly. Where Corinne’s facial expressions previously felt anguished, they now seem serene. Corinne’s face feels more at rest, less tense and pained. They open their mouth as melodic birdcalls fill the performance space: finally, creatures they can communicate with. A flock of shared understanding.
The Severed Wing made me ponder at length on how I conceptualise my disability and the ways in which it limits me. It also made me think a lot about birds and the boundless movement they represent. Exchanging an email conversation with Corinne in the weeks following the show, I note that birds seem to have occupied a larger place in my thoughts, artfully flying amid the folds of my brain. At a gig I go to, an artist (Creepy Crawly) sings ‘Feathers and Skin’, a retelling of their dream in which they’re a pigeon flying above a motorway. I return to a thought I often have about birds as revolutionary beings: what if all migrating birds were to collectively flap their wings at the exact same millisecond and the force of their murmuration ruptured a hole in time as we know it? What if the enormity of the motion broke every clock in the world, thrusting us into a glorious in-between of beaming light and cavernous opportunity?
I often wonder what the world would look like if we embraced crip time as commonplace, not marginal. Would we feel the need to fly away and escape? Would we conceive our true selves as winged others? After the revolution, when utopia arrives, will I still be disabled?
The beauty of this performance is that none of these questions have to have immediate answers, because no two disabled people will live their life the same way. As Corinne explains after the performance, it is amazing that they have been able to bring this to life through remote collaboration despite their bed confinement. They also explain that, whilst they have benefited from the opportunity of remote performance, this wouldn’t work for everybody – and in-person opportunities are equally vital. What is foregrounded is that approaches to engagement for both disabled artists and nondisabled audiences mustbe centred around a model of both/and, not either/or. This is especially so given the harrowing ‘return to normal’ and thus neglect of access that so many of us have experienced in this ‘post’-Covid landscape.
In discussing their hopes for the piece’s impact, Corinne notes that, whilst physical confinement is obviously inherently challenging, the main challenge they face is being excluded from society. Like many of us, Corinne lives in fear of losing access to remote working and viable ways to have a career as an artist whilst having to do so much of this online. In the Zoom audience, a comment flies in: ‘access as architecture’. The phrase stops me in my tracks. What would the world look like if we embedded access into the very essence of everything we do, from the nine-to-five workday to scratch nights, as the Lowry has done?
In closing, Corinne asserts that remote or livestreamed performance art should be ‘a mainstream realisation’ that is programmed equally to in-person performance. In turn, they wished for programmers to increase access to performance art for audiences who struggle to leave their homes or beds. It is especially poignant that Corinne has used their own work to call attention to the needs of disabled artists collectively, asserting that, ‘whilst I would love to transform into my true self, a bird, I would rather live in a society where in-person and remote access is treated equally’: they would sacrifice their own unmitigated freedom for a fairer future for the collective. This is crip solidarity.
If there is one thing I wish would come from this piece, it’s that I want every able-bodied person in my life to watch it and really listen to what is being said. As Corinne pleads in the post-show video’s conclusion, ‘don’t ever forget us’.
Corinne: The Severed Wing, Lowry, 14 November 2025.
Amie Kirby is a writer, researcher, producer, and archivist based in Salford.
This review is supported by Lowry.
Published 16.12.2025 by Jazmine Linklater in Reviews
2,515 words
