Cathy's Art Diary

Dull exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum looking at design for and by disabled, deaf and neurodivergent people and communities. I admit this show may have suffered from the fact I went to it after the Marie Antoinette exhibition however I found it drab and impenetrable in places. They also took a broad definition of design not only objects and fashion but also design for protest and items to make a point which I felt were nearer to being contemporary art than design. I also have lots of gripes with the labels. Firstly that the labels which carefully numbered obects in a rather complex system with the room and object number. That in itself was fine but they then didn't number the actual objects so it you were scanning the works on display to work out which was the one you were reading about. Secondly the language was trying to be so inclusive that it became convoluted and complex. From the introductory board which read "For those who are non-disabled or are less...

Thoughtful exhibition at the Museum of the Home of photographs of disabled people at the door of their homes. Curated by Digital Disability the show presented the photograph with words by the sitter on what their home means to them. Some commented on having been in institutions as children, often referred to as ‘homes’ giving home a dual meaning to them. Under each picture there was then a biography of the sitter and, in some cases, toys representing disabled people.   Closed 25 June 2023

Thoughtful online lecture from the National Gallery looking at disability in art in reaction to their exhibition on “The Ugly Duchess” by Quinten Massys. Hannah Wallis, who had written a teaching pack for education department on the exhibition, and discusses how the show and the gallery discuss embodied difference. She talked about the importance of the language that is used starting with the different titles the picture has had over the year. Although it is still popularly known as “The Ugly Duchess” the gallery now gives it the title of “The Old Woman”. She talked about how the word ugly comes from the Norse for to dread which has led us to lining ugliness to fear and we fear what we don’t understand. Also how the idea of the grotesque has been used to signify moral failure. I had done a number of talks on this exhibition which placed it in the context of when it was painted so it was interesting to take a step back and look at it again with a contemporary eye.  It made me...

Fascinating online talk from the Foundling Museum looking at how children with what we would now call learning disabilities were treated by the Founding Hospital. Thomas Aird, a volunteer at the Museum, took us through some detailed research he had done on children listed as ‘idiots’ at various times in the hospital, tracking what had happened to them over the years. I was fascinated by the amount of detail he had found on the children, often finding where they had been placed in apprenticeships and in some cases finding out when they died and where they are buried. Most touching was Ann Valley who lived in the care of the Foundling Hospital for the whole of her 83 years. He explained that the term ‘idiot’ was not seen as derogatory at the time, it only became so as narrower definitions of conditions were adopted. He also explained how the issue had become more pronounced following the period of general admission to the hospital between 1756 and 1760 when, in return for government...

Interesting online talk from the National Gallery on how disability is reflected in art both in the pictures in the gallery and in the artists who created them. The talk took the form of an essay by film maker and artists, Richard Butchins, who talked about how disability has been viewed over the centuries using examples from the gallery’s collection. He also talked about how art itself has deformed bodies such as El Greco’s elongated forms, Picasso and even the beauty we see in the Venus de Milo even though her arms are missing now. He then went on to talk about artists who we might now be consider to be disabled, either physically or with some sort of mental condition, but who we don’t discuss in that context. He told us how the disabled community are reclaiming some of them. Some of these were obvious such as Van Gogh but I’d not realised before that Reynolds was deaf, Blake had cirrhosis of the liver and epilepsy and Cezanne was colour blind due to diabetes in later life and h...