Скачать или смотреть Imogen Kate - Artist Statement

I created this series to explore if a person is ever ‘wholly’ disabled, we all carry many roles and attributes in life and being disabled is just one. We use lanyards to identify ourselves to the outside world, just like the entries in the Poor Law Union reports attempted to classify and identify claimants. On lanyards I find we often carry tokens of who we are on a deeper level. They keep things that matter to us close- quirky badges, tokens from loved ones, workplace identity cards, keys to our homes- all symbolic of roles and achievements that throughout history it was never believed disabled people could attain. I drew lanyards as they are a very small and unnoticed display of who a person is and how they choose to label themselves rather than how others label them.

I was inspired by the Poor Law Union archive and particularly the column in the application and report book that asks if a person is “partially” or “wholly” disabled. We know very little of the people listed in these documents, but we see even in 1874 they were subjected to the same question we disabled people are still asked today- “so, how disabled are you?”. The question that often leads to either assistance or abandonment by the state. Where the line may lie between being partially disabled or wholly, and who is entitled to help and who isn’t, is still a debate still being fought out today.

I believe there is vibrant joy in intersectionality and that each person has a cluster of identities we move between. Each lanyard indicates a disability, but they also demonstrate that disabled people can work, have families, own homes and study. We are not ‘Wholly’ anything except ourselves.