Allison Laper

Artist Alison Laper came into class today to give us a lecture based on her struggles and experiences, as well as coming to terms with being a disabled person with limb definition, as her legs are abnormally small and she doesn’t have hands or long limbs, and how she has come to terms with living the way she does, her self confidence and body image as well as her journey as an artist throughout all of this.

I felt that he lecture was very inspirational as she went into detail about the experiences she had been through with her family, teachers and friends going through school reacting to her body when she was hardly old enough to understand it herself. She spoke about the methods of trying to ‘make her look like a normal, able bodied person, which was damaging to her development as she needed t learn how to use her limbs as they are instead of adding machinery to her body which won’t help her development with her body mentally or physically.

 

The her speaking about her journey as an artist, taking self portraits of face and body to use for her artwork, but having to get someone else to press the button of the camera even though she stated she directed and staged the shoot but simply needed someone to press the button for her.

 

She also explained in depth throughout, the opinions of her own body how it felt looking physically different to everyone around her and being an outcast in her own family from her own mother who didn’t understand how to take care of her with no limbs, even though it would be the same way as taking care of a child with limbs. It’s inspiring how confident she is in herself ad the way she looks as she’s completely become used to the fact that she has limb deficiency which in honesty doesn’t make a different to anything in anyone’s lives apart from how she sicily moves and carries out actions.

 

We then went through with an activity of painting but doing everything without using our hands, we could use our feet or our mouths like Alison Laper but not our hands to understand not only how she carries out day to day activities, but also to think of different methods of creating marks with unconventional methods and how they differ to using our hands.

The verdict of the workshop was that it obviously felt very unnatural for me t be using my mouth to hold a paintbrush, and could be quite painful, but even holding it in my mouth I wasn’t limited at all to the kinds of brush strokes I could create or the times of lines and splashes could make by moving my head in different ways to create something exciting.