Exploring Disabled Joy: Attenborough Arts Centre presents Traces

Traces

23 February – 19 May 2024, Gallery 1

Attenborough Arts Centre is proud to announce our upcoming exhibition Traces, exploring disabled joy through creative mark-making. The multi-disciplinary show aims to transform preconceptions through the work of contemporary artists alongside giant wheelchair prints made by local children.

The exhibition central themes formed when Pasha Kincaid, Traces co-producer and co-curator, was an artist in residence with the SENsory Atelier Programme in 2022. Whilst there she offered wheelchair printing as a mode of creative investigation. This was the start of an exciting collaboration with Ash Field Academy, a school for children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) in Leicester.

In 2023 she returned to the school with co-producer Morgan Stockton, Artist and Director of Seeds and Dreams, and a number of art activists as they facilitated intensive sessions of wheelchair printing and giant mark-making with children and young people in wheelchairs from ages 4-19.

A selection of the dynamic wheelchair prints created by the children are to be shown alongside the works of contemporary artists Sue Austin, Daryl Beeton, Laura Dajao, Aminder Virdee and Joseph Wilk. The artists were selected to inspire young people to go beyond the perceived limitations of disability and were asked to offer work in response to the children’s creative processes to explore the concept of traces.

The exhibition will include new commissions, co-produced projects and several significant loans such as the film and stills from Sue Austin’s ‘Creating the Spectacle’, an immersive dance performance and underwater exploration which the artist undertook using her uniquely modified wheelchair. Daryl Beeton and Laura Dajao will be performing a dynamic duet as part of the Traces programme on April 7, which will be filmed and added into the exhibition. Aminder Virdee will present a newly commissioned sculptural piece to be revealed at the launch and Joseph Wilk has been working with local wheelchair users to explore movement within the gallery space, to create a collaborative digital drawing that will be projected in the space.

Traces encompasses printmaking and mark-making, digital drawings, photography, video, sculpture and performance that ask us to reconsider the creative potential of disabled joy while placing the work of children and young people at the centre-point of the exhibition.