‘But we who occupy the bodies of crip time know that we are never linear…’ – Ellen Samuels, Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time (2017)
‘In sleep, I dreamed of vigorous motion’ – Laura Hillenbrand, A Sudden Illness (2003)
I first met Hannah Leighton-Boyce when she had just returned from a residency with the Hugo Burge Foundation in the grounds of Marchmont Estate, Scotland. Like myself, Hannah identifies with the label of ‘disabled’ or ‘chronically ill’, having lived with an autoimmune condition since a teenager. As a result, much of our first meeting, which took place over Zoom in April 2024, ebbed and flowed between ideas of disability, embodiment, process and productivity. As a Type 1 Diabetic, my journey with and relationship to chronic illness has been neither smooth nor linear, and seems to be increasingly complicated as the years progress. In 2021, I contracted Pneumonia and in the following two years I suffered several Covid-19 infections. My energy has been markedly lower since, and every day I remind myself that my idea of productivity simply isn’t what it used to be.
This reminder, though alienating at first, spurred me towards a turning point in my practice as both a creative and a community organiser. In 2022, I founded the Crip Culture Collective, a support group for chronically ill, disabled, and neurodivergent creatives and art lovers. Part meet-up group, part advice forum, the collective serves to bring together crips in Manchester who connect to the words ‘creativity’ and ‘disability’ in a myriad of ways. Its formation shows that now more than ever, crip solidarity is a lifeline. Especially in the arts.
It was clear that mine and Hannah’s shared crip experiences were going to be a recurring theme: my disability announced itself rather rudely as my CGM sensor alarm blared within the first five minutes of our discussion. Whilst I was initially embarrassed, Hannah sympathised, asking questions about my Diabetes, how I was feeling and even whether certain conversations can impact my health. In this moment I knew I’d found a kindred spirit, and over the course of an hour and a half – which I had to bring to a close, ironically, to get to an appointment – we discussed how disability impacts not just our respective art practices but ourselves as people. Because, after all, they are not separable things. Their edges blur into one another.
For Hannah, her practice is a way to reconcile these edges and at once connect with her own physicality whilst disconnecting from her socialisation as a ‘sick person’: making her art practice embodied, processual, and imbued with the (re)negotiation of things in space and time. These relationships between physicality, art process, art product, and mental state called to mind the term ‘bodymind’, which Micha Frazer-Carroll uses in Mad World: The Politics of Mental Health (Pluto Press, 2023) to elucidate the inseparability of physical and mental health.
Hannah tells me that she has always been interested in what she describes as tessellations of material: the ways in which materials move, fit together, and negotiate their relationality. It seems to me that this parallels Hannah’s conceptualisation of herself and her practice as a renegotiation, and perhaps acceptance of, different facets of herself – both the ‘sick person’ and the ‘artist’. Hannah describes her practice to me as: ‘a way to be with myself through being creative… to see different parts of myself coming back together again, deciding how they want to fit together.’
Hannah’s artistic explorations of the past ten years include drawing, sculpture, and video. Across these different media, there exists a central interest in archive, memory, process, and sensory experiences.
Take 2013’s If walls could talk, the last yarn. This piece consists of thirteen balls of alpaca, cotton, and wool fibre found at Salts Mill, Saltaire. Upon feeling the weight of the empty spinning room, which once was filled with the noise of rattling spinning machines, Hannah spun the remnants in a windowless shed – a testament to untold stories of those working in Salts Mill from 1853 to 1986. The process was filmed by Mary Stark. The film arrests the senses: Hannah sits, focused and contemplative, spinning repetitively. The noise of the wood rattling with each spin fills the empty room. Hannah’s hands are seen delicately wrapping the thread into balls. And all the while, the process calls to mind the previous workers of the mill: their histories blurring into this present moment. In this way, one feels Hannah’s interest in her practice as a form of documentation.
Currently, she explores this through collage and, more recently, creative writing. She accounts for the change by explaining that, although she has always been chronically ill as an artist, her venture into collage coincides with a cancer relapse , and subsequent treatment. Put simply: the effects of the diagnosis, treatment, and confines of a hospital bed rendered many things impossible, but assembling paper into collages was not one of them and, conversely, these collages created a feeling of potential.
Hannah’s collages are small: many are A5 size, some are larger, though no bigger than A4. As one can see from glancing over Hannah’s Instagram page, which she used to archive and document work produced in her residency, there are varying degrees of detail. Some are composed of just two overlapping pieces of paper, while others are a single piece folded into a more three-dimensional form. The pieces I find the most interesting, perhaps, are those that contain very fine warps and wefts of paper woven together to make intricate textures. It is hard to imagine the patience required to make something so delicate.
Hannah began to weave paper into her collages during her cancer treatment, particularly during an immunotherapy treatment wherein Hannah was injected with her own modified cells designed to regraft with her own to fight the cancer. In an Instagram post from Hannah’s residency, she writes that she dreamt of her body accepting these cells, willing the treatment to work. This interested me: it seemed that, again, this was Hannah’s way of processing and connecting to her physicality through her artistic practice.
When given the opportunity to undertake a residency, Hannah explained that she was excited to explore her collages further and had applied mainly because ‘there was no expectation of clear output – it was just a space to be creative’. This resonated deeply with me, as somebody who wishes to work in ways that defy typical timelines, outputs, and expectations of ‘productivity’. Hannah and I discussed these concepts at length, arriving at the assertion that productivity is not solely the idea of producing, but under our capitalist structures there is an expectation that what is produced is useful (i.e., available for consumption or, to a degree, exploitation), and inherently ‘good’ quality. What comforted me was that we both agreed that we had to create for creation’s sake – as a means of self-care which, in turn, is a mode of survival and a way to process the world around us. ‘Of course’, she tells me, ‘it’s easier when you’re dictating the pace of your making. That’s why the residency was so nice.’
Hannah explained that the residency was filled with a complete grounding in nature: one Instagram post reads, ‘I’m off out of the studio this afternoon to draw and soak in the sunshine and smells of the greenhouses and plants there’. Amid this grounding, Hannah explained that her collages emerged as a daily practice, akin to a ritual or meditation. Whilst she would take each day as it came, not expecting or planning much, her daily collages would be a reflective response to her time at the residency.
Having had such rich conversations in our first meeting, I was delighted to visit Hannah’s home studio in May 2024. As I’d imagined, it was a leafy green haven filled with crystals, herbs, and houseplants galore. The studio room itself could be summarised by the term ‘organised chaos’, chock-full of drawers upon drawers of paper cuttings, the sides littered with stacks of magazines just waiting to be cut into.
On arriving, she tells me that I am the second person to visit the new studio room, which feels like a strange honour. As we sit together in comfortable silence, mug of tea in hand, before we re-submerge ourselves in conversation, we look out of the window together.
‘I think I’ve spent so much time staring out of these windows over the last year whilst undergoing my treatment and recovery ’, she tells me.
It’s no wonder: they are large, inviting, and directly frame a view of the local park. I ask her if she looks out of the windows differently now that this room is a studio and not her place of convalescence (this new studio was Hannah’s former bedroom – she has since moved into another room in the house). She tells me that being away at the residency has felt like time to heal – both for her and the house. In this way, it’s the same space but it is an altogether different one.
Moving to the collages, we stand together and talk through the paper assemblages tacked to the wall before us. They feel profound in their intimacy. Each piece feels as though it really is the sum of its parts. The paper, comprising odd offcuts from magazines and other ephemera, is often muted, earthy colours. Often, one collage comprises pieces of similar colours as the primary contrast is formed in texture. At first appearance, Hannah has a masterful way of choosing materials to marry. However, she explains to me that lots of the pieces come together through ‘a constant process of adjustment’, which cannot be overthought.
I ask Hannah how the compositions of her collages arise. She explains that she is fascinated by the points of contact between material: overlaps, edges, negative space. Many of the collages on the wall contain strips or flaps of paper glued to them, hanging loose and casting shadows on the wall. Some collages even comprise several pieces of paper folded into rings and interlocked like a paperchain. It feels as though she is experimenting with how paper can actually be, or appear to be, fluid. In explaining what it is about these points of contact that interest her, Hannah says: ‘It’s the tension in the movement. The edges, the way they are themselves not static – they brush up against each other. There’s slippage. They inhabit the space of movement, slipping from one state to another.’
It is this brief pause, this in-between-ness, that Hannah successfully captures. This liminal space is filled with potential. Hannah explains that she sees her pieces as a negotiation between herself as artist, the material, and the decision: what’s going to happen? Who decides?
What I find interesting is that this relationship feels only partially negotiated by Hannah, and more so by the materials themselves. As Hannah talks through her pieces, she explains that ‘some wanted to be woven, others didn’t’. In explaining, she imbues a sense of agency into the materials she works with. As the artist, Hannah is a facilitator, a mediator, whose role it is not to determine the relationship between materials, but to bring materials into conversation and provide an arena for them to make their own meaning. To intuit and interpret movement, contrast, and fluidity. These points of contact are themselves what make the pieces – they are defined by their relationship to each other, how one edge blurs into another, how warps and wefts of paper assume new life when woven together.
As Hannah tells me, ‘sometimes it just feels right’.
Hannah’s most recent experiments have been with writing, which she tells me gives her a stronger feeling of vulnerability than she is used to. Like collage, writing is a way for Hannah to negotiate her relationship to the world around her. As such, she often uses the speech-to-type function on her phone when walking in the park. Together, we retread familiar ground, discussing the idea of completion, whether our work is any ‘good’, and whether that’s actually the point at all.
Indeed, I don’t think that is the point. For both Hannah and myself, it seems that creating is processing. It is a way to make things make sense when they do not. It is a way to slow time for even a moment – to pause amid movement, to observe this juxtaposition and to make space to prepare oneself for whatever follows. As crip artist and writer Johanna Hedva says in Sick Woman Theory (2020), it is to forget all concept of output and to screech everything to ‘a glorious motherfucking halt’.
Amie Kirby (she/her) is a producer, curator, and writer/researcher based in Manchester.
Corridor8 have partnered with Axis on three newly-commissioned pieces of writing, engaging with the work of Axis artists. Similar to Corridor 8, Axis champions and supports contemporary visual arts in the UK. As an organisation, they provide artists with resources, opportunities, and platforms to support and showcase their work. Their aim is to democratise access to contemporary art. To learn more about Axis, or to become a member, please visit www.axisweb.org
Published 25.07.2024 by Jazmine Linklater in Explorations
2,334 words