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The Disability And…Podcast gets right to the heart of some of the most pressing issues in arts, culture and beyond with a series of bold, provocative and insightful interviews with disabled artists, key industry figures and the odd legend. The Disability and…Podcast is currently monthly.
Colin Hambrook
Welcome to the Disability and... podcast. I'm Colin Hambrook, the founding editor of Disability Arts Online, and it's my real pleasure this month to introduce Ellen Renton, poet, performer and theatre maker from Edinburgh. While keeping poetry at its core, her work is varied and has included theatre, journalism and multimedia collaborations and indeed, Ellen's worked with Disability Arts Online several times over, over the years and Ellen, this latest project you've been working on this year, the archive stories project with the Paralympic trust. Can you tell us a bit about it?
Ellen Renton
So it's part of a wider kind of program of projects run by Buckinghamshire Culture, Bucks Culture, and this story strand in particular, is a celebration of it being a Paralympic year, and the Paralympic heritage that exists within that county. And because of that, the kind of wider disability history that exists there. If people don't know, the Paralympics began in Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Buckinghamshire. And yeah, there's a very present kind of legacy from that across the county, but a lot of that history isn't shared necessarily or isn't understood that widely beyond the confines of that county. So a large part of this project is to do with the sharing of that knowledge and that history and the celebration of it as well. So the project has a few different partners, but kind of two of main ones we've been working with are The National Paralympic Heritage Trust and NDACA, the National Disability Arts Collection Archive I was there's one too many letters in there for me, I always get that wrong, but and so there's five artists, and we've been engaging with those archives and thinking about ways in which we can present what we find and respond to it artistically and share those stories with people
Colin Hambrook
That's really, really exciting Ellen must have been quite a few works by disabled artists, especially over the last, the last 12 plus years in that archive. Can you tell us a bit about each of the other four artists and your own practice, and how that kind of engaging with that archive, sort of was planned, and how it unfolded?
Yeah, so I was kind of first involved with the project because of some work I had done connected to the Paralympics previously, through a piece of theatre that I'd written and performed called Within Sight, which was a story about a character who'd been unsuccessful in making it to the Paralympics. And it was kind of a discussion about where we hold the Paralympics culturally, and how it shapes our view of disabled people. So that had kind of led to my involvement in the initial discussions around this project. And when I was asked kind of what would be your dream in terms of how to engage with these archives, I just I said that I felt this really felt like the perfect project to form a collective for there's so much stuff in these archives that one person could never really represent what's there, and the fact the five of us now can still never kind of represent what's there. There's so much there, but it's a really beautiful thing to look through all all of this history with a group of people who represent not only different disabled identities, but different identities, generally different personalities, different art forms and different life experiences. And it's really led to really exciting and kind of wide ranging responses. So in the collective, as well as me, there is Arden Fitzroy, who is a everyone actually does lots of things, there's no one who's kind of just in one art form. But Arden does a lot of work for stage and writing and poetry, but also more kind of conceptual visual poetry, I would say, in terms of what they're working on for the exhibition. And also has a background in stage combat and a lot of physical movement, which is really interesting given the Paralympic connection. And then we have Jess Starns, who again has a very varied practice, works with textiles, works digitally, works with participatory and community art, but also has really extensive knowledge about museums and exhibitions and best ways of presenting art to people. We have Guy Morris, who's a visual artist, again, that term being quite broad. He works in a lot of different mediums and with different materials, a lot of sculpture, as well as print and things like that. And then we have Noor-e-Sehar Ali, who works with text and also with sound, and does a lot of work with radio, and also has a background in kind of philosophy of disability and academia, so it's very varied, but there are lots of ways where everyone's practices intersect, and that's quite exciting, because I feel like everybody is kind of encouraging different things out of each other, or kind of different collaborations are popping up as we go. But there's not a sort of natural this person will do all the writing and this person will do all the sound. Everyone's kind of chipping in with different parts of it. So it does feel like a true collective in that sense.
Colin Hambrook
How did the collective come together? Did you choose each other? Or what was, what was the the basis for, for founding the collective?
Ellen Renton
It was just through open call, looking for people who were interested in in archives, and working with archives, and then looking for people who were keen on collaboration, or had previously worked collaboratively, and then also people with connections to the county of Buckinghamshire as well.
Colin Hambrook
How, how did you go about then going into those archives. What? What? What form were the archives presented to you in?
We spent a week in June. That was our first time meeting in fact, it was three days, I think, in High Wycombe at the NDACA archives, where we met Alex Cowan from Shape, who leads on the archive, who's amazing, who has, like, knows about everything in there, and has so much knowledge. And that archive in its current state is in quite it's in a very small room. And also, actually, at the time when we were there, coincided with the Venice Biennale and the huge exhibition of disabled work that was happening there. So actually, when we were there, a lot of the work wasn't because that had been taken to Italy, but we still saw so many brilliant things. And Alex would bring out things that he thought would be of interest to each of us specifically. But we also had a lot of time just to kind of rummage in there and bring things back. We had this space in the Bucks New University there where it's housed, and we just sat there all day and kind of rummaged through things, and if we thought something would be of interest to someone else, we'd pass it around the table or read things out that were of interest. And at certain points in the day, we would kind of share what we'd come across. And that was particularly interesting in that archive, because the forms were so varied as well. So in terms of there was sculpture, poetry, pamphlets, we found lots of cassettes, and then sat and played them on a cassette player. And then also in that archive, what I found really interesting was the way in which that was so connected with the politics of that time, the archive kind of extends the bulk of the work that I came across certainly begins in the 90s, potentially late, late 80s. So to see where the art crossed over and was such a significant part of the disability rights movement in the 90s, and finding kind of photographs from protest or the art that was crucial to those protests or shared around those protests, was a really exciting thing to come across. So that was kind of our first engagement. And then in August, we were in Aylesbury, and we spent a bit more time the Paralympic Heritage Trust at Stoke Mandeville Stadium and Stoke Mandeville Hospital as well. They've got some displays in there. We went to the county archives, which has a lot of things that aren't that has everything to do with Buckinghamshire, kind of ever so that is an enormous archive, and a lot of that wasn't specifically what we were looking for, but it also had a lot to do with the connection with the local area and the Paralympics and disability in the area more generally. And then finally, we spent a day the sort of stores of the Paralympic archive, which, again, were huge, and they had a lot of things like uniforms from Paralympics, or items of clothing from opening ceremonies, medals from every Paralympics, and kit and the pin badges that Paralympians share, I suppose every place we went, we engaged with it slightly differently, because what was presented to us was different. Every time in an archive is never, is never one thing. I think the word sounds like it would be a sort of like a kind of dusty library, but each of those places was something very different,
Colin Hambrook
And were there specific things you were looking for? Were you looking for stories or ideas? How? What was the creative process of engaging with the archives that you encountered?
I think, at the beginning, and that was why it was great to begin with the artist archive. We just had a look at kind of what we gravitated towards. And I certainly, anyway, took that as time to just kind of be excited and like, see, see what grabbed my eye, see what kind I connected with emotionally or made me interested to find out more. And then as time went on and into the second residency, people had a little bit more of an idea of what they might like to work on for the final output of the project. And so everyone sort of began to ask for slightly more, you know, you kind of hone down what you're looking for. But I think being a group of disabled artists, we all had specific aspects that we were going to be naturally more interested in um so a lot of people began their things that might relate to their own experiences, and then widened out. Or, I think we Yeah, everybody went in with a kind of different approach. But I suppose everybody had their own practice. We can introduce that to each other, and what we're interested in generally, and that sort of was the starting point, I suppose.
Colin Hambrook
So did everyone have an idea from the start of what kinds of outputs they might you might be working towards? Or was it more organic and sort of more on an intuitive and emotional level, responding to the objects, the stories that you came across in those archives?
Ellen Renton
Yeah, definitely, definitely more organic. But even though there were things I knew I was interested in in terms of things that I might find in the archives. I didn't know how I would present them ultimately, and I really wanted to, I think we all did, to make sure it was a genuine response to the archives and kind of archive LED. And I think thinking about what people are working on now for this, their sort of final project, a lot of the form has been shaped by things that we found as we went along.
Colin Hambrook
Can you tell us a bit about the things that you found and especially that resonated for you personally?
I mean, it was so much. It was quite overwhelming, actually at times, how, how much that we found, I think definitely in the in DACA archives we spent a lot of time with. Well, I can talk about one particular we found a cassette of a musician that we really loved called Kyle Harris, and the song became a bit of a soundtrack to our week there. And so that cassette, and what that did for all of us emotionally it will be quite central to the final exhibition. We're hoping to kind of include the physical cassette itself. We looked a lot at posters and lineups and things around the workhouse cabarets. I read poetry, poetry collection by Johnny Crescendo. We listened to a lot of his music as well, a lot of photography. I found really beautiful in that archive. There was so much in that archive, actually, between, between all of us. And then in the more recent residency, in the more Paralympic based work, I spent a lot of time with issues of The Cord, which was the magazine for paraplegics, or for people with spinal injuries that began at Stoke Mandeville hospital. And I sat and read them one afternoon, just I found them so interesting, and that's definitely been a huge influence for what I'm working on now. We also looked a lot around the process of classification and the materials that are kept in the archives to do with that. I think it's really interesting, generally for us to see a lot of the language or how disability is spoken, about how that has changed, and how, more often than not, actually it hasn't changed.
Colin Hambrook
Yeah, yeah, the specific terms that tend not to be used now, but were really important then, things like arts and disability was really important way of distinguishing political work from work by disabled artists that that was not necessarily informed by disability from a social model perspective, there were, there were very clear lines then. The art was very much led by the disability movement through those years. It was very much a, the art was a product of the disability rights agenda. I'm really interested to know more about your output, and how what you've discussed I know you work in in so many different ways. Poetry is a kind of core medium that you're, incredibly skilled, and have had a lot of success in dare I say, is it poetry that you're focusing on, or are you are you experimenting with other forms as well?
Yeah, I think it will be. So the sort of final outcome which we're still in the process of, of organising, but will be, likely be in November, is an exhibition which which will showcase all the work from the whole collective. And so there are things that people are working on, individually or collectively, and we're kind of interested in where what each of us does can overlap, but in terms of what I'm working on for it, yeah, it is mostly poetry that I'll be doing, but I was quite interested in the form of that, basically, and how, also how that can be presented in an exhibition in a way that's interesting. So for instance, one piece that I'm making in response to The Cord magazines, I was so fascinated by the fact that so many of the articles I was reading that they were from the 70s, mostly. And I just thought these are conversations that disabled people are still having about frustrations with transport, with work, with funding, with social attitudes, I felt a lot of recognition when I read those articles. And even though the context has changed, and maybe the language has changed, really at what was the essence of the disabled people's frustrations are still what we're frustrated with now. So I took a lot of the phrases that were that stuck out to me from those articles and created a kind of a found poem with those phrases, but in terms of the form and how it will be presented, I came across there's a sculpture at NDACA, which was the first thing that we saw when we arrived there, and the artist name was totally gone from my mind, but it is a sculpture of a man in an armchair, but it's all made out of cardboard.
Colin Hambrook
James Lake.
Ellen Renton
yes,
And I thought was beautiful when I first saw it. And Alex at NDACA was explaining that because quite often, materials that will last or that are expensive have not been available to disabled artists. That's one sort of thing that a disabled archive, or disability arts archive comes up against, is that things that disabled artists are making are not necessarily going to last forever, and that cardboard structure is a good example of that, because that that won't keep that shape, this idea that these artworks won't be there forever, and those materials are not built to last, and therefore that that art isn't built to last. But there was something quite beautiful about that, and all of us definitely became really inspired by that idea of impermanence, and what, how that relates to, you know, who gets remembered and whose work remains in an archive, or whose work is preserved and whose isn't.
Colin Hambrook
Yeah, and a remarkable thing about that sculpture is that and I, and I remember, I remember Tony Heaton commissioning it for Shape, back in the day, and him saying, then about how, how it will change over time because of the nature of the materials and how, you know, we have this idea of of art, especially kind of, well, sculpture and 2d art that it's, it's preserved in its in the form it was in when it was first made you know forever that somehow we have this sort of idea of impermanence about art when art really is as much about the process and that piece of work says so much about process because of the nature of the materials that James works with. So how, how did you respond? How, what has your response been? Is it a poetic response? How are you thinking about how that will then be presented?
I think that that particular piece is so funny when that's the first thing that we saw, and I think actually it's had such a lasting impact on everyone. But definitely that idea of impermanence is, I feel like there's echoes of that throughout the exhibition in lots of different ways, but for me, as opposed to inspiring the content, I suppose it's made me think a lot about the form and one particular piece I'm planning on recording it. And rather than doing so have it playing on a loop, I'm planning to record it and just kind of keep reading it for as long as I can, and allow that to include whatever external noises I can't control over length of time, whatever that does to my voice, whatever cracks or gulps or misreads come into that, I suppose that's my equivalent, as someone who works with words materials, the words are, or the voice is the material in, in that sense. So that feels like a way to respond to that in a cross form way.
Colin Hambrook
Yeah, I like that analogy of words and materials. , I'd love to hear a bit more about the final exhibition, where, where it's being shown, and how it's being brought together, and it's been commissioned by the National Heritage, National Paralympic Trust, what is, what is their involvement been in curating the final exhibition?
Well, so they, yeah, they’re a partner on the project, but it's Bucks Culture, who are kind of the lead organisation who we're working with. There are several organisations involved, both in terms of how they let us into their archives, but also part of working with them was the fact that this exhibition will respond to a new set of oral histories that they have recorded with ex Paralympians. So that was another thing that we engaged with a lot in, or we have can and continue to do so, because it's a wealth of material there they have, I think it's 12 or 14 new oral histories, which are all about an hour and a bit long. So there's a lot of stuff in there for us to listen to and to respond to as well.
Colin Hambrook
And are they stories of the Paralympians themselves?
Ellen Renton
Yes, yeah. And not only their Paralympic experience, but a lot about their childhood and how they got to a to a sort of Paralympic place, you know, how they like came into sport, and also what the Paralympic experiences were like and what life was like for them afterwards. So they've been a really interesting resource to have as well, and there are quite a few responses to them in the final exhibition.
Colin Hambrook
Did any of those stories relate? You were talking earlier about the magazines from the 70s that you were delving into. Was it Cord I think? Did any of those stories from those oral histories kind of echo with stories that you'd read in the magazines.
Yeah, absolutely. And the time range for the oral histories was fairly broad as well. Um, some younger people, but a lot of people who were at the Paralympics in 80s, 90s and I think what I really loved about the oral histories was how they kind of rail against a sort of inspiration narrative. And I suppose that's always going to happen when you hear about someone's whole life and all the ordinariness in their life, and all the exciting things as well. You know, when you hear when you hear about full life like that, it puts moments like the Paralympics into context. So I really enjoyed listening to people talking about the jobs they had, or their experience at school, and then in the same breath, talking about their time as a Paralympian and the way that they sort of normalise those experiences. So yeah, there's something else that people are responding to, but the final exhibition will be it's still sort of final details being sorted out. It will likely be in Aylesbury. And we're sort of a lot of the work has digital elements, so we're kind of looking at ways in which those can be accessed online as well.
Colin Hambrook
Going back to the oral histories were, were there any oral histories, stories from within those oral histories that kind of stood out for you, that you echoed with your own experience?
Ellen Renton
Yeah, I'm actually still, actually have been doing that this week still kind of working through a lot of them, but I've been focusing on listening to some blind and visually impaired athletes, because that relates to my own experience, and interested in hearing about particularly their experiences of school, trying to respond to that in some way, or their experiences of getting into the sport. And I think what I find interesting across a lot of the histories is a sort of parallel between. My own experience of arriving at poetry, and their experience at arriving of sport, the idea that it's different for different people, but finding a space in which you are allowed to be disabled and you are allowed to need what you need, and your body is allowed to do what it does, and the contrast in how people speak about their younger experiences and then their time as a Paralympian is huge because of the contexts of those situations and the isolation potentially giving way to community, and I feel like that's a really beautiful thing that's at the heart of them. And I definitely felt, felt a connection to that.
Colin Hambrook
In disability sport, there's quite a lot of categorisation and sort of dividing up of kind of medical attributes, as it were, How did people like within their own words, how did they kind of relate to that was, was there some resistance? Um, whilst I can imagine, as you know, sort of having to play the rules in order to be included. But that I it's as a disabled person myself, it's sort of anathema that that being put in certain boxes.
It's really interesting, because I knew that not all categories are included at all Paralympics in the sense that you know at the Olympics, not all sports are included every single iteration of the Olympics. They might swap them around, same with the Paralympics, and sometimes that affects categories so people could train for a particular sport, and then actually, that's not going to be in this next Paralympics, you're not going to be there. And I had an awareness of that. But what was really interesting was coming across, both in the archives and in the in the oral histories, the idea that sometimes the boundaries of different categories shifted. So who was allowed to be included in one group changed, who you were competing against changed. So some people spoke about that a lot, that they felt that was unfair, that at certain times, they were racing against some group of people, and then they were put in with people who they felt had an advantage over them. So that was a really interesting thing to consider and to look at how that potentially shapes cultural understanding of disability. If the Paralympics is one of the few places where people, in a mainstream media sense, engage with disability, it was really interesting for me to think about how that categorisation is viewed by non disabled people, and how that probably has an impact on how they understand disability. I know that Jess in the group. I'm sure she won't mind me saying is looking into a particular category that existed and now doesn't, and what she's kind of investigating that category, why it's not there anymore, and what that says about how we understand specific disabilities.
Colin Hambrook
Yeah, yeah. I think talking about visual impairment, blindness, there's a huge frustration, I think, amongst visually impaired communities that it just isn't understood by the non disabled world that you know, you, you either are blind, have no sight, or you are sighted. It's, it's such a conundrum is, you know, within kind of the world of Deaf culture, I think, I think generally the non disabled world kind of understand that there are different levels of hearing loss, but, for some reason that doesn't seem to translate into that more open general understanding of blindness and visual impairment.
Ellen Renton
Yeah,
I think, I suppose, generally, we're not good kind of overall at like anything partial, any sort of, any complex identities, or any anything that doesn't exist in a binary. I think people generally just culturally, we're not so good at understanding that, but I know as well, especially in visually impaired community, there's a lot of, for instance, a lot of Paralympic categorisation or sports categorisation would take into account visual field. So kind of how your peripheral vision and how wide your vision is, and visual acuity, how far you can see. But for me, it doesn't you know someone with albinism, so things like um light sensitivity or different kind of different symptoms that your eyes might experience could completely change my visual acuity from one moment to the next, depending on the context, but that doesn't come into consideration. And I think sometimes that's just too that just feels too complex for people to understand. Anything that fluctuates, anything that can't be pinned down by a definition, is just generally much more misunderstood.
Colin Hambrook
Yeah, yeah, I agree and I think, I think you're right. I think the Paralympics do go some way to kind of opening up that understanding to a wider non disabled world, which is really important. It's just seems to be very slow, and the kind of that awakening, that awareness, seems to be just very limited in how it comes about. And I guess partly that's because, you know, the Paralympics only happens once every four years, and disability sport in in the middle of all that is fairly non existent on a sort of mainstream platform. So it's kind of like there's this one shot once every four years to get those messages across. I hope this exhibition will do something in sort of documenting that history, it sounds really interesting that the approach that you've all made as a collective into looking in a much more nuanced way at the stories that come through those different archives, and you said it's going to be shown in Aylesbury, and possibly there'll be online iterations?
Ellen Renton
Yeah, there'll definitely be online, online elements. A lot of people are working in digital formats, or formats that, you know, there might be something physically in the exhibition, but it kind of exists beyond that as well. So think there would definitely be some, yeah, a digital way people can engage with it as well.
Colin Hambrook
That's fantastic. And I really look forward to kind of delving into, into that, into that work more. It's kind of from personal perspective I that archive at NDACA is kind of, a lot of my life is in, is in that little room, a lot of the people and a lot of the work that I was engaging with through the 90s is there What's next? What's next for you after this, this project is over?
I think, just quite a lot of writing time. There's a lot of kind of projects that I've started that I need a lot of sort of more kind of solo writing time beyond that. So that's my plan for the start of next year. And then I am performing at a music festival. I work a lot with an electronic musician, Lord of the Isles, and I sort of he accompanies my poetry with electronic sound. So we're performing at festival Skye Live in Scotland next year. So I'm really looking forward to that. So that will be a kind of rehearsal process and that's we've performed together before, but not in a festival context. So that'll be a kind of new and exciting thing to navigate.
Colin Hambrook
Wonderful, all the best with that. That sounds fantastic, and thanks for joining us today Ellen, and thank you to all of our listeners out there, thanks for tuning in, and we'll say goodbye and thank you for joining us.
Ellen Renton
Thank you.