art smarts

Chapter 3. Inspiration

Sometimes, inspiration has to do with community and with changing perceptions about that community.

Recently, I have been creating audio-portraits of individuals and communities by working with their voices and the soundscapes of their environments. I’m inspired by people’s voices and soundscapes, reflecting upon life experiences and drawing out meanings and purposes. I hope that the audio-portraits I create convey the essence of the communities with which I work, and that they inspire and move listeners to emotion and awareness. Unless the subject matter is about disability, people may not necessarily know that I am disabled when they listen to my work.

Academically and practically, electroacoustic and soundscape composition tend to be on the outer fringes of the mainstream musical and art worlds. I have received support from my mentors, Barry Truax and Hildegard Westerkamp, from S4DAC & the Vancouver Adapted Music Society, from family, friends and other artists.
sylvi

There’s a lot of different things that inspire me. I’m inspired by people I meet; I’m inspired by combinations of colour and texture; I’m inspired by ideas, stories, things that have happened to me, things that have happened to people I know. I’m inspired by medieval European art at the moment.

I have goals that are about not just doing what I already know how to do but pushing myself into things that are new and scary at times: pushing my eyes in what I can see and pushing my brain in what I can conceive of and going beyond what my expectations and assumptions are. It also has to do with the content. I like my work to be meaningful to people in my life who I care about and in my communities in a way that kind of stretches out beyond what my day-to-day life encompasses.
persimmon

When somebody tells me that they did something because they saw someone inspirational, it really blows my mind. I think the best stories are the ones where someone follows their dream or their passion from an inspiring moment. I’m hoping that having disability art in the mainstream will provide those inspiring moments.
james

I paint women. That is the whole of my topic. And I do that for various reasons. I did a lot of work with victims of violence who were primarily women and my paintings are inspired from that work. I want to produce positive images of women and women’s experiences.
bernadine

Some people don’t wait for inspiration. Sometimes the process of making art gives you new ideas and the work takes on a life of its own.

I don’t really believe in inspiration. Yes, it happens sometimes, but if you wait for inspiration you may wait a long time. Just start writing on your computer or go to the studio or pick up your pencil and draw, and you’ll see: inspiration will come. But not if you just sit and wait.
france

A few final words...

Writing is talking, sculpting is talking, painting is talking, dancing is talking. Whatever the art form you have, that’s going to help get out of you the things that destroy you. Your art reflects what you are. It reflects the problems, it reflects your life, but it’s also more than that: it’s therapeutic, I guess, to use a rather technical term for it. I find that pouring out my self into my writing, as I do sometimes, is exhausting but at the end of it I’ll feel a lot better.

When I was writing a chapter of a particularly dark episode in my manuscript, I found myself depressed for a day or two afterward, although I told myself at the beginning, “Now, you’re just writing this stuff, you’re not living it all again.” But you are living it all again; your art brings it up and hauls it out of you. In so doing, it’s almost like exorcising an evil spirit. It’s a very positive thing, I think. I guess the bottom line for any human being in any endeavour is that you can always achieve a great deal more than you ever think you can. If you’re an artist or writer of whatever genre, it’s true for that, too. And indeed, while it’s sometimes extremely painful if you have a disability and your art is reflecting that disability in some way, it’s also a very helping process. Not just for the person who’s doing the art, but also for people who will read, will see, who will experience the art of the person. I think it’s a helping thing for a whole lot of people.
ed

Chapter 4 Art, Identity and the Disability Movement