Nerys Johnson: Contexts, Archive and Collection
Lead Research Organisation:
Northumbria University
Department Name: Graduate School
Abstract
This proposal approaches the archive and collection of Artist and Curator Nerys Johnson (1942-2001) by utilizing the methodology of 'Crip Time' as a lens to convey how her lived experience of disability underpins her practice. My research will be attentive to readings of the Artist and Curator Nerys Johnson within the lens of her disability - among them, evocations of 'disability as pivot' (Quayson, 2007) encountered through ableist readings of her life and work.
To narrate Johnson's life from the vantage point of an able-bodied subject is to politicize the disabled body; to observe mental, physical, cognitive or intellectual impairment as but 'the fallow end of the Nadir'; a problem to be compartmentalized or overcome through the chronology of her life (May, 2020).
Crip Time critiques the assumed longevity of the normative life cycle by able-bodied narrators - 'compulsory able-bodiedness' - as that which slows with the natural progression of age (McRuer, 2015). Rather, Crip Time is borne out of 'a blossoming of attention in attenuation, in waiting, in abeyance', for the next fallow period; it is marked by stopping and starting again (Kuppers, 2014).
My first chapter will investigate Crip Time through the writings of numerous important scholars and essayists with lived experience of disability: for example, Alison Kafer (Feminist, Queer, Crip, 2014); Molly McCully Brown (Places I've Taken My Body, 2021) and disabled Curator Amanda Cachia (What can a Body Do? 2012).
At a methodological level, Crip Time converges with an understanding of historical consequence bent by Queer temporalities (Halberstam, 2005) or fragmented by Feminist critiques on productivity and labour (Weeks, 2011).
To narrate Johnson's life from the vantage point of an able-bodied subject is to politicize the disabled body; to observe mental, physical, cognitive or intellectual impairment as but 'the fallow end of the Nadir'; a problem to be compartmentalized or overcome through the chronology of her life (May, 2020).
Crip Time critiques the assumed longevity of the normative life cycle by able-bodied narrators - 'compulsory able-bodiedness' - as that which slows with the natural progression of age (McRuer, 2015). Rather, Crip Time is borne out of 'a blossoming of attention in attenuation, in waiting, in abeyance', for the next fallow period; it is marked by stopping and starting again (Kuppers, 2014).
My first chapter will investigate Crip Time through the writings of numerous important scholars and essayists with lived experience of disability: for example, Alison Kafer (Feminist, Queer, Crip, 2014); Molly McCully Brown (Places I've Taken My Body, 2021) and disabled Curator Amanda Cachia (What can a Body Do? 2012).
At a methodological level, Crip Time converges with an understanding of historical consequence bent by Queer temporalities (Halberstam, 2005) or fragmented by Feminist critiques on productivity and labour (Weeks, 2011).
People |
ORCID iD |
| Victoria Horne (Primary Supervisor) | |
| Rachel Boyd (Student) |