Em(body)ing the Indescribable
Disability Aesthetics Art Gallery
Hello friends and comrades! It’s been a while!
I am so excited to share my virtual art gallery with you all! This is half of a final project that I created in my Disability and Aesthetics class in Spring of 2025. The final paper that I wrote to accompany this gallery will be coming out for paid subscribers next month!
I chose 5 pieces that I feel embody the indescribable experience of disability, that go further than the tip of the disability iceberg and lead even the currently-abled (able-bodied or not-yet-disabled)
I just finished a new zine about abolition, reform policies that don’t work, and paths to prison abolition and the abolishment of the police state. I should be sharing this zine by the end of July! I am also working on a zine about types of rhetoric used in misinformation, providing both the definitions as well as examples of how they are used in the media.
Samuel Beckett, an Irish avant-garde playwright, novelist, and Nobel Laureate, is widely recognized for his contributions to modernist and absurdist literature. Endgame, first performed in 1957, is a bleak, tightly constructed one-act play featuring four characters in a post-apocalyptic setting. Hamm, blind and unable to stand, sits in a chair at center stage, while his servant Clov, who cannot sit, hobbles around him. Hamm’s parents, Nagg and Nell, live in trash bins, legless and nearly immobile. This static, confined staging creates a world in which physical limitation is not symbolic, but real and central to the dramatic structure. Endgame engages directly with the theme of embodiment by foregrounding disabled bodies as part of the play’s existential inquiry. Disability aesthetics are not marginal, but essential: Beckett’s use of constrained, decaying bodies refuses idealized notions of wholeness and mobility. Instead, he renders human existence through dependency, deterioration, and repetition. The characters’ interactions challenge ableist assumptions about autonomy and value, proposing new modes of understanding relationality, vulnerability, and presence. In doing so, Endgame not only stages the human condition as fraught and bodily, but also opens space for a deeply embodied, disability-informed aesthetic sensibility.
Alice Wingwall is a blind photographer, sculptor, and installation artist whose work challenges visual norms and expands conceptions of perception, memory, and spatial awareness. In Hand Over Dog: Joseph at the Temple of Dendur, Wingwall captures a moment through her unique sensory engagement with space. The image is composed from her embodied perspective—her outstretched hand in the foreground, a guide dog at attention, and the looming ancient architecture of the Temple of Dendur housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The photo confronts the dominance of sight in both photography and museum spaces. This work exemplifies embodiment by locating vision not in the eye, but in the body—in touch, movement, and interdependence. It embodies disability aesthetics by asserting a non-normative gaze and emphasizing access through relationality (the guide dog) and physical orientation (the hand). Rather than aiming for conventional composition, Wingwall’s framing reflects how she navigates the world: through tactile, auditory, and spatial cues. The piece invites viewers to reconsider what constitutes “seeing” and who gets to produce visual culture, offering a radical rethinking of perception, autonomy, and authorship in art.
Face Opera II (2013) by Christine Sun Kim is a performance piece that reimagines the concept of an opera through the lens of Deaf culture and embodiment. In this work, seven Deaf performers form a choir that “sings” using only facial expressions and visual nuances, without employing their hands or voices. Face Opera II directly engages with the theme of embodiment by centering the physicality of communication. The performers’ facial movements and gestures become the primary medium of expression, highlighting the body’s role in conveying meaning. This embodiment is particularly significant in the context of Deaf culture, where non-verbal cues are essential for interaction. By presenting an opera devoid of sound, Kim not only subverts the expectations of hearing audiences but also asserts the validity and richness of Deaf modes of expression. For hearing viewers, the absence of sound and reliance on visual cues challenges the primacy of auditory experience. For Deaf audiences, the focus on facial expression without hand signs offers a novel exploration of ASL’s components. The work invites all viewers to reconsider the boundaries of language, sound, and expression, highlighting the diverse ways in which humans convey meaning beyond traditional auditory channels.
Judith Scott, a self-taught fiber artist born with Down syndrome and rendered deaf from an early age, lived nearly four decades institutionalized before beginning her prolific art practice at Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland. This untitled work features a shopping cart, an everyday, utilitarian object, entirely enveloped in tightly wrapped yarn, string, and fabric, obscuring its original function. The wrapping process, intensely tactile and time consuming, becomes a form of embodied communication for Scott, who had limited access to spoken or signed language. The piece is a compelling manifestation of embodiment, as it contains physical presence, labor, repetition, and material intimacy. The act of wrapping, a gesture often associated with care, concealment, or protection, can be interpreted as a metaphor for how disabled bodies are both seen and hidden within society. The sculpture resists easy interpretation, much like the lives of many disabled people who have been misread, overlooked, or silenced.
This sculpture, it should reset on its own without a problem (if you leave it alone it will only get worse), was created by Galen Marquess, a disabled student artist at Pratt Institute who experiences frequent knee dislocations and often has difficulty feeling understood when it comes to their disability. The kinetic elements encourage viewer interaction, which involves the viewer in the embodiment of Marquess’s disability, making their disability “visceral and un-ignorable”. This piece not only shares the experience of Marquess’s disability, but embodies the overall pain and difficulties found in living with a disability, with its bright splashes of red paint over a calm blue background, and the use of daily metal objects to hold the leg together.