Sometimes I’m a Ghost and Then You See Me

Sometimes I’m a Ghost and Then You See Me

This work explores disabled visibility and the contradiction of being simultaneously scrutinised and unseen. Disabled people are frequently discussed in public and political rhetoric, particularly through increasingly hostile narratives around support and perceived incapacity, while the inaccessible nature of the outside world means many disabled people are less able to occupy public space. The title imagines this absence through the figure of a ghost: watching and waiting at the edges before suddenly becoming visible, almost like a rare creature unexpectedly encountered in the wild.

The vessel’s apparently functional legs play with assumptions made about disabled bodies through appearance. They are recognisable as legs, but contribute nothing to the vessel’s ability to stand; instead, the body of the pot supports them. Their redundancy reflects the logic of looking at a disabled person and deciding what they should be capable of simply because their body appears intact. Disability does not always look sufficiently ‘disabled’ to satisfy the expectations placed upon it.

Above the vessel sits a hybrid creature assembled from available moulds: part mouse, part lion, part human. Its human face becomes an ‘I’m OK’ mask, reflecting the performance of wellness that can develop through living with chronic illness. Pain and difficulty become so normalised that accurately expressing their severity can itself become difficult; sometimes being believed seems to require performing illness more visibly than it is ordinarily lived.

The lion introduces a quieter image of strength. Calm until survival demands otherwise, it reflects the reserves of resilience and fight that chronic illness repeatedly calls upon. Its position on the vessel was not predetermined. A shelf-like form emerged unexpectedly through slip casting and suggested somewhere for the figure to sit, allowing the material process to participate in determining the final composition.

The work ultimately asks what it means to be seen as disabled, who is permitted to decide what disability should look like, and what remains invisible when disabled people cannot easily enter the spaces in which society expects to see them.