Please note that this article includes names of Aboriginal elders who have died.

First published in Artlink, reprinted with permission.

Issue 44:3 Warltiti / Summer 2024

Issue Guest Editors: Ava Lacoon-Robinson, Claire Osborn-Li, Hen Vaughan

Managing Editors: Una Rey and Belinda Howden

Publication date: 1 December 2024 (Adelaide)

Cyborgs, wheelchair flight and disability arts

I’ve been thinking lately about the history of wheelchair design. The earliest depiction I know of is a vase painting, on an Attic red-figure kylix, of Hephaestus in a winged chariot, c. 525 BCE. Around the same period there are depictions of wheeled mobility devices (sans wings) in Ancient Greek and Chinese art. 

Self-propelled mobility devices are a relatively recent invention. Wheelchairs in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were slow, heavy, and designed to be pushed by an attendant. The modern self-propelled wheelchair was only made available in the mid-twentieth century. 

Two and a half thousand years after Hephaestus and his winged chariot, wheelchair users are finally capable of something like flight. Modern lightweight manual chairs are made from carbon fibre, titanium and aluminium. Mine weighs only seventeen kilograms. Uphill, it’s still a strain, hauling my weight and that of my chair. Downhill it feels like I have wings; I am skimming over the surface of the road like a bird over water.

Today, we are in a period of extreme technological acceleration. The growth of the internet, digital technologies, and artificial intelligence systems are rapidly transforming what is possible in our daily lives and art. 

Nobody is more intimately connected with these technological advances than disabled people. Many of us use mobility aids and prostheses that were only invented in the last decade. I use an external wheelchair power assist device (the SmartDrive MX2) that was only patented nine years ago. The control mechanism that I currently use was developed just last year. I write this essay from bed, on my smartphone, using dictation software.

Disabled people have always been at the forefront of technological innovation. Myoelectric and robotic prostheses, augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) devices, speech generating and recognition software, hearing aids and cochlear implants, and AI-generated captions are all relatively recent technologies that have had a massive impact on how we interact with the world.  It has never been built for us, so we must adapt and invent to live and thrive within it. 

We are cyborgs in the truest sense. 

In her 2018 essay The Common Cyborg, Jillian Weise criticises the metaphorical invocation of cyborgs in science fiction and academic theories. The use of the cyborg as metaphor ‘co-opts cyborg identity’, she writes, ‘while eliminating reference to disabled people on which the notion of the cyborg is premised. Disabled people who use tech to live are cyborgs. Our lives are not metaphors.’

The cyborg conditions of modern disability are reflected in our art, and in the art of nondisabled people, whose lives and practices are also influenced. Everyone experiences sickness, and everyone becomes disabled if we live long enough.

In the 1910s, groundbreaking Australian modernist artists Roy de Maistre and Roland Wakelin collaborated on paintings inspired by synaesthesia. De Maistre experienced lifelong health issues attributed to childhood tuberculosis. His disability prevented him from pursuing a musical or military career, but it gave him a unique perspective as a painter. De Maistre and Wakelin were not wheelchair users, but wheels–specifically colour wheels–were central to their artistic practice. The Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) collection holds a gadget that de Maistre invented and used for decades: a layered set of colour wheels, in which the colour spectrum corresponded to notes on a musical scale.

De Maistre and Wakelin are widely credited as the first artists in Australia to employ and exhibit pure abstraction in their art, notably in Colour in Art in 1919.  Their synaesthesia-inspired compositions, which they called “syncromies”, were attempts to visualise music in colour. To me, these paintings feel like depictions of the disabled world I want to live in: suffused with colour and light, unbound by the natural order but with its own internal rhythms. A veneration of the wheel and all that it generates.

Other Australian artists became disabled later in life. Jeffrey Smart, a renowned precisionist known for his satirical urban landscapes, used a wheelchair in his last years as an artist. His final work, Labyrinth, was painted from his wheelchair in 2011. Labyrinth depicts a lone figure lost in an endless high-walled maze. 

As a fellow queer wheelchair user, the painting feels like a secret, painful in-joke. Becoming disabled means having walls rise up around you wherever you go. Wheelchairs extend our mobility, but they cannot breach a built environment that excludes us. There is no escaping the labyrinth of inaccessibility. 

Labyrinth depicts the darkest aspect of the abled, disabling world. There is no light or hope in this painting, though perhaps there is a little dark humour. In Smart’s landscapes, everyone’s mobility is limited. Equal access inaccessibility.

Smart’s paintings are too lonely for me to dwell on for long. I find myself turning to different disabled visions, ones that centre joy, movement, protest, solidarity, and—above all—community. For someone like Smart, becoming disabled was an experience of profound limitation. For others it is an experience of transformation, an opportunity to confront the limitations of our humanity.

In many Aboriginal languages, there is no specific word for disability, because disability doesn’t set people apart. In societies with strong traditions of community care, everyone has different needs, and everyone’s needs are met by each other. In the 1960s and 1970s, Bundjalung and amputee artist Lester Bostock (1934-2017) was a pivotal figure in establishing Radio Redfern and, alongside Paul Coe, Gary Foley and Jenny Sheehan, founded the National Black Theatre. He often spoke about the “double disadvantage” of being Aboriginal and disabled. For Bostock, the antidote was community. He dedicated his life to community-led grassroots projects, including community radio, theatre and filmmaking.

Interdependent living, not independent living. Solidarity, not solitariness.

Yolŋu artist Dhambit Munuŋgurr similarly merges respect for tradition and community with experimentation and adaptation in her work. Munuŋgurr has been painting since the 1980s, but radically altered her practice after a car accident in 2007. She now uses a wheelchair.  Because she had trouble grinding traditional ochre pigments by hand, she received special permission from Yolŋu elders to use acrylic paints instead. Dhambit is now known for her signature use of brilliant blue in place of natural ochres on bark and larrakitj (hollow logs). For her, these colours evoke the sky, sea and earth. Most of her paintings are depictions of Yolŋu stories passed down from her family and ancestors.

Maōri dancer Rodney Bell spoke to the Sydney Morning Herald about his wheelchair aerial performance, The Air Between Us (2021-ongoing): “I have been gifted this vehicle of dance. I’m upside-down, my organs are moving, my body is swaying. I’m in touch with nature, I’m up in the air, I am where the birds live, what more could you ask for?”[1] Bell’s wheelchair isn’t something restrictive, but an agent of freedom and an extension of his body.

Bell’s performances are hypnotic and ethereal. When I saw him perform last year above the Tallawoladah Lawn in front of the Museum of Contemporary Art, I thought again of Hephaestus in his winged chariot. Unlike Hephaestus, Bell does not fly alone. In most of his performances he is accompanied by other dancers. In his aerial practice he is held up by intricate rigging; in the rest of his life, he is held up by community, by his disabled whānau. This is a reciprocal relationship, not an extractive one. On The Air Between Us, Bell said he was “excited to give back to the community, especially the ‘tangata haua’ — a Māori term that he translates to ‘our disabled people that lean differently in the wind.’”[2]

Wheelchair-using Afro-Caribbean choreographer, dancer, DJ and lawyer, Riana Head-Toussaint, similarly celebrates disabled movement languages in her work. Her artistic practice is experimental, multidisciplinary, and moves across various digital and physical formats. In her 2022 residency at Firstdraft, Sydney, she developed Animate Loading: 1.[3]She explored unconventional performance elements including sound design and audience activation to ‘create works that interrogate entrenched systems, structures and ways of thinking; and advocate for social change’, and rejecting ‘traditionalism and arbitrary formal notions of what art can be.’[4] From 2022 to 2024, Head-Toussaint has organised CRIP RAVE THEORY, an interstate party, proposition and political statement. Head-Toussaint describes CRIP RAVE THEORY as ‘a club night outside the club that draws on disabled/crip knowledge to create more intersectionally-accessible party spaces.’[5]

Earlier this year, I collaborated with Riana in Queer as in Crip, a project she curated for AGNSW. Myself and three other wheelchair users–Hanna Cormick, Kerri Shying and Sam Petersen–recorded ten minutes of spoken word performance. Kerri and I are primarily poets; Hanna and Sam are primarily artists. I consider all of them to be my tender comrades in queercrip resistance. Sam often talks about the power of art to reclaim space:

I like to permeate a space, make it my own, because I am not welcome in so many. I get inside, as much as I can, with myself and my fluids. I try to get inside your minds, and laugh, and scream.[6]

As modern technologies continue to grow and transform, so too will disabled communities and disability arts. As the global coronavirus pandemic continues, disabled artists are more vulnerable than ever, but our work adapts and thrives in crisis. We organise collaborative art projects over Zoom; we create accessible digital spaces; we build community both online and offline. 

Jillian Weise writes that ‘this feeling of trial-and-error, repetition and glitch, is part of the cyborg condition and, by extension, the disabled condition.’[7] Above all else, the cyborg survives; the wheel rolls forward.

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[1] Rodney Bell quoted by Billie Eder, “’I am where the birds live’: Rodney Bell on twirling in titanium”, Sydney Morning Herald, 21 January 2023.

[2] Rodney Bell quoted by Ian Ruder, “Wheelchair Dancer in the Sky”, New Mobility, 24 January 2023.

[3] Animate Loading was first developed and presented as a part of the 2021 exhibition Concrete at Pari, in Western Sydney, curated by Rebecca Gallo and Kalanjay Dhir.

[4] “Riana Head-Toussaint”, firstdraft, accessed 21 October 2024.

[5] Riana Head-Toussaint, “CRIP RAVE THEORY”, fine print, Issue 29: Access, September 2022.

[6] Sam Petersen, artists website, access 21 October 2024.

[7] Jillian Weise, “Common Cyborg”, Granta 24 September 2018.