Helen Stratford’s exhibition Public S/Pacing at Bloc Projects in Sheffield, on from 16 May to 8 June 2024, could be viewed as both a personal exploration of the implications of chronic pain and a collaboration that seeks answers to how our environment and society can respond differently to enable all citizens.
Stratford trained as an architect and has long been interested in power dynamics found in public spaces. Subverting our relationship with urban and natural environments through play has been an ongoing aspect of her work. I had previously encountered this at Yorkshire Sculpture Park in 2021. In ‘Further Afield’, a project with long term collaborator Idit Nathan, Stratford encouraged visitors to play and explore by situating wooden railway sleepers engraved with words on a trail around the Upper Lake. However, by the time the last section of the installation was put in place, she required a mobility scooter to reach it, no longer able to pursue her own goal of encouraging people to walk ‘further afield’.
Stratford’s back pain had become chronic, a word that appears regularly in the exhibition, preventing her from walking more than fifty metres. It was an experience that has caused her to reassess her art and how she lives her life. It brought her into contact with the ‘Woke Designers Reading Club: Designing on Crip Time’ programme devised by Kaiya Waerea and Michiel Teeuw. Stratford talked to me about how this course energised her, enabling her to see that she could still produce art and that she needed to work with her chronic pain. Ignoring it was not possible, it had to be part of the equation.
In her introduction to Designing on Crip Time (2024), the publication that resulted from the above programme, Waerea writes that their work has ‘at times willingly and at other times unwillingly resisted the normative pace and patterns of production.’ Stratford has embraced this dichotomy around wanting to produce but needing to resist the pace and drive to increased productivity set by others. At times this has included questioning what society means by productivity. We talked also about how society undervalues the hidden labour of thinking and planning ahead. Public S/Pacing embraces the idea of ‘Crip Time’, the concept that pace is set by the able-bodied and the idea that we need to challenge understanding of productivity and accept slowness.
Stratford’s reassessment of her practice came across to me in three elements: an examination of productivity, a greater focus upon collaboration, and a focus upon the need to enable people to rest in our built environment. (For those with chronic pain or extreme fatigue, resting will include the ability to lie down.) To produce Public S/Pacing Stratford collaborated with a variety of artists and peers who each examine health and disability in different ways through their practices. She set out to learn from others – visiting them in person or talking online and asking them to contribute to her exhibition. A number of them have contributed to the blanket that supported these journeys and which holds a central position on the gallery floor – some physically, some through ideas. She hopes the methods adopted ‘demonstrate how “slower”, collaborative and generative ways of working and knowledge-sharing can support modes of self-care and mutual aid.’
Public S/Pacing demands to be touched, experienced, inhabited. Entering the gallery, you become integral to the exhibition as you decide where to stand, sit or lie. Bean bags and benches are frequently found in galleries, but they are generally utilitarian: places to perch whilst watching a video or pondering an installation. Here they are as central as anything on a wall. Meaningful decoration adorns every cushion, seat and the blanket on the floor. Even the windows are softened with padded sills that speak of pain (with their displaced vertebra motif) but offer comfort.
One of the ways Stratford explores the concept of productivity is through flow charts. It is a methodology she previously employed when working in the marginalised community of South Bank Middlesbrough. Through organisational diagrams she was able to show that what were considered unproductive lives due to the lack of work in the area were in fact busy and full. When applied to the lives of disabled people, the diagrams become even more intricate and revealing. What may be a single action for the able-bodied may need to be broken down into multiple stages for someone with a disability. These are lives that often require a great deal of decision making and planning.
Some of the flow diagrams have been enlarged, covering the walls and extending onto the floor. This again required collaboration. Initially drawn on paper by Stratford, the diagrams were projected onto the walls by gallery staff who helped her replicate them there. Others remain on paper: some are Stratford’s originals, but the collection has grown as others have contributed. The decision about whether to lie down features frequently, an option that becomes much harder if you are not in your own home.
Lying down is probably even more unusual in our climate than in much of the world. Siestas, lying under a tree or just sitting still have long been elements of daily life in hot countries. Lying down in the sun is socially acceptable, doing so in Sheffield Station is not. Stratford talked to me about her efforts to lie on the station concourse and how she was moved on by station staff. Attempts to lie down on a train resulted in a range of reactions, including comments from other passengers, being asked not to, or very occasionally being shifted by a sympathetic conductor to first class. The exhibition includes a photo of Stratford lying on a station platform and in the entrance to a covered walkway at Sheffield Interchange. The latter did not elicit a response from security but did receive a range of responses from passers-by, including intentional avoidance, concern and questions about protest.
The response of some pedestrians in Sheffield had been prompted by recent climate change protests, but lying down as resistance has a long history within the disability rights movement, particularly when demanding better access to public transport. Lying down is now being used as an act of resistance by individual artists. Stratford was influenced by a legacy of artists using lying down in their practice, including collaborating with disability artist-activist Liz Crow and with interdisciplinary artist Rhiannon Armstrong, who had already developed ‘radical resting’ as an art form. Armstrong contributed a list of instructions that emphasise the importance of self-care, the need to lie and relax, whatever others may think.
Despite being born out of pain, Public S/Pacing was a visually attractive exhibition. The red and white fabric seats, blanket and printed statements are vibrant. Sometimes printed and sometimes embroidered, a frequent motif looks decorative, but its source is a medical diagram of a cross section of a vertebra. Words have been chosen to help us think about how we enable bodies, including a poem by queer disabled artist and researcher Sarah Hopfinger about their relationship with pain. I found it to be a positive exhibition about a difficult subject. It exposed dilemmas and contradictions. For instance, how we claim to value hard work but fail to value those who – in overcoming debilitating conditions – might work harder than others. How to even be an artist is a struggle. Helen was thankful to have received funding to employ a support worker to help her with an Arts Council application, otherwise the process would have exhausted her, and the exhibition would not have happened.
Public S/Pacing feels like the beginning of a conversation. I look forward to seeing where Stratford and her fellow ‘crip’ artists will go in their mission of ‘cripping the planet.’
Debbie Rolls is a writer based in Bradford.
Public S/Pacing ran from 16 May to 8 June 2024 at Bloc Projects, Sheffield.
For Public S/Pacing, the following practitioners shared their time and thoughts with Helen and Bloc Projects: Rhonda Allen, Rhiannon Armstrong, Emma Bolland, Jos Boys, Liz Crow, Char Heather, Sarah Hopfinger, Terri-Louise Doyle, Raisa Kabir, Kirstie Millar, Bella Milroy, Poppy Nash, Idit Elia Nathan, Abi Palmer, Kaiya Waerea and James Zatka-Haas.
Published 10.07.2024 by Benjamin Barra in Reviews
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