‘Creating the Spectacle!’

Our Big Picture is proud to present this trilogy of films, which are a single-screen versions of a series of 360-degree videos developed as part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad.

Austin can be seen in a specially designed self-propelled underwater wheelchair wearing a summer dress and flying along mid-water, negotiating banks of coral and shoals of fish. Sue descends to find the Paralympic Torch burning in a cave and then liberates it by carrying it back up to the surface.

It is not uncommon for non-disabled people to see mobility aids as symbols of dis-empowerment and constraint. However, through this work, Austin aims to draw attention away from those negative associations and reposition the wheelchair as the symbol of freedom and movement, that it is for many disabled people. 

About Sue Austin

Sue Austin is a multimedia, performance and installation artist with a socially engaged practice shaped by, and emerging from, her experience of disability. As Artistic Director and Co founder of Freewheeling she “recognises the power of starting at the ‘personal’ and then finding archetypal, numinous images that ‘communicate’ through connecting with the universality of human experience.” She aims to find dramatic and powerful ways to reveal the ‘Hidden Secret’ of disability, arguing that this ‘secret’, if explored, valued and then shared, can act to heal the divisions created in the social psyche by cultural dichotomies that define the ‘disabled’ as ‘other’.

Sue’s Previous works have used surreal juxtapositions and quirky re-presentations of disability equipment to facilitate new ways of seeing, being and knowing. This led to an opportunity to spread the intentions for her practice on an international scale when she was awarded an Unlimited Commission as part of the Cultural Olympiad in 2012. This commission, ‘Creating the Spectacle!’, is an ongoing, durational artwork that presents a ground breaking series of live art and video works of an underwater wheelchair as it flies along mid water with its human occupant, transforming preconceptions through images that aim to excite and inspire. Since then the artwork has received international attention with Sue giving interviews across the world, being awarded further commissions, being invited to speak at TEDxWomen and TEDMED with a video featured on TED.com and even being asked to speak at NASA, Stanford University, Monterey Bay Aquarium, etc, with key notes given at Bank of America’s Women’s Global Conference and Mayo Clinic’s Arts and Humanities Symposium. This has lead to an estimated 433 million people becoming aware of the artwork through those channels. Sue would say that each person that becomes aware of the underwater wheelchair and ‘Creating the Spectacle!’ has become part of the artwork too. The next iteration of ‘Creating the Spectacle!’ will present to the world a wheelchair that both flies and dives! This aims to reshape preconceptions by materialising the freedom that a wheelchair gives one to move into to new ways of being and into new ways of experiencing the world.