ABNORMAL - Towards a Scientific Model of Disability

Ju Gosling, artist-in-residence, launches her exhibition at NIMR on 31st January.

A digital photographic image, manipulated to look, on close examination, more like a painting. An olive-skinned woman with a mild spinal curvature is standing sideways on to the onlooker, against a white background. She is dressed in a white sports bra and briefs, with her feet together and her hands at her sides. On her left shoulder is a tattoo in bright red-orange colours of a fox's head, and there is a chain bracelet on her left wrist. She has very short dark red hair, but her features are obscured by a fake fur mask of a fox's head, fixed by a white band around the back of her head. Behind her, her shadow is animalistic and vaguely threatening. In the bottom left corner of the image, the word 'Abnormal' is stamped out in black capital letters in an old-fashioned typewriter-like print. There are similarities between this pose and the traditional poses of disabled people in medical photographs.

The exhibition, ABNORMAL - Towards a Scientific Model of Disability continues until the 31st March, and is also available online. Within the website Ju documents her artist's residency in 2006-2007, which explored:

ideas about normality
how scientists conceptualise disability and physical impairment
and whether there is a 'Scientific Model' of disability that is distinct from the 'Medical Model'

The residency was funded by the Wellcome Trust, and Ju worked closely with NIMR scientists Malcolm Logan (Developmental Biology) and Evelien Gevers (Molecular Neuroendocrinology).

More about theoretical models of disability can be found on Ju's website (follow the link 'Helping the Handicapped').

[30 Jan 2008]

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