Inclusion

Falling Outside of Expectations

13" X 16" at 300 dpi

Digital with procreate

This project, surprisingly based on the evident quality of this drawing, was the most time consuming out of all of the ones I've worked on this year. I worked on the first 3 main iterations of this drawing, each for over 6 hours before creating this. This drawing took me 2 hours, and because I was able to escape my perfectionist loop, this looks comparatively polished and neat. This project helped me think about how hard it is to escape the one mainstream narrative that those with disabilities face. During one of my earliest attempts, I tried to create precise linework filled in with solid colors. There was a teacher in a wheelchair and a student also in a wheelchair inspired by this. But, this only expresses some aspects of having a disability, and it expresses it in a black and white, already solved sort of way. When I created this, I wanted to do just the opposite: I wanted to show how people with disabilities don't live in the harsh lined boxes we try to put them in. This project relates to my life because I have done research on how hard it was historically for those with mental and physical disabilities as well as how they felt about being defined by them. Helen Keller is defined in history for her disabilities even though she spent much of her life advocating her controversial political stances. I can't even imagine what that would feel like to be written into our history as a symbol of progress and characterised by not a life of hard work but something that I was born with.

I made this using procreate on my tablet.

I used value and repetitive pattern to create form and a sense of movement. I used lines and the color's escape out of them go convey meaning. Seeing as the deadline has long since past and it has been already submitted, I probably won't work on this more to resubmit although I want to continue to explore these ideas.