Wheelchair Ocean Mermaid Nemo - Blog Posts

Sue Austin - Creating the Spectacle (2012)

As part of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad, performance and installation artist Sue Austin created this series in which she—in her self-propelled underwater wheelchair—explored the magnificence of the underwater world, aiming to generate a widespread public debate about the nature and value of contemporary arts practice shaped by the experience of disability.

Artist’s statement: 

“My studio practice has, for sometime, centred around finding ways to understand and represent my embodied experience as a wheelchair user, opening up profound issues about methods of self-representation and the power of self-narration in challenging the nexus of power and control that created the ‘disabled’ as other.”