Disability Pride is Back! at the Melbourne Fringe Festival!

I am so very proud and excited to announce that the Disability Pride Mural is going to be reinstalled as an arts event as part of this year's Melbourne Fringe Festival, September 13-30!

Disability Pride is Back!

Announcing the proud reinstallation of Melbourne’s first Disability Pride mural, bigger and better than it was before. 

This live art installation/performance brings together some of Melbourne's best known disability artists and activists to reinstall a collaborative paste up mural that celebrates the diverse, rich, but often hidden culture of Melbourne’s disabled community. This Disability Pride mural also challenges narrow stereotypes of disability, reclaims public space and makes a stand that joins with the International Disability Pride movement.

Disability Pride is Back! is led and produced by visual artist and disability activist Larissa MacFarlane, already known for exploring her own disability culture through her handstand paste-ups across Melbourne’s streets. In talking about what led her to create this community artwork, Larissa says:

'I live with 19 year old brain injury and this journey of acquiring and learning to live with a disability has had incredible highs and lows. And it is a journey that I want to be proud of. But in a society that doesn’t value disability, I have often found myself silenced and shamed. After learning about the International Disability Pride movement, with a 30 year history of worldwide parades and marches, I wanted to bring some of that joy here, to Melbourne. I wanted to create a public space for people to explore and share the power of identifying as disabled, and to tell our stories, together, in public, with pride. This mural will be a day of celebrating our disabilities and madness.’

Disability Pride is about reclaiming our identities and bodies as our own. It seeks to change the way people think about and define disability, to break down and end the internalised shame among people with disabilities, and to promote the idea that disability is a natural and beautiful part of human diversity in which we can take pride. Disability Pride also aligns with the Social Model of Disability that sees disability as caused by the way society is organised, rather than by a person’s impairment or difference. 

Between 11 and 4 on September 20^th Larissa will be joined by diverse members of Melbourne’s disabled community in a mass paste up party, to install the artwork of over 40 people with disability.

It will be a great display of the often hidden culture of disability. People with disabilities represent 20% of the population, and yet we are practically invisible in employment, public life, civic participation and our media. 

This event is leading the way forward in being disability led and produced. We hope to see many more disability led art projects in this country into the future. This Disability Pride mural is the first of many more to come.

Artwork installation will take place during the first week of the Fringe Festival (13-20) with a mass paste up party on Thursday 20th September 11-4. 

People with disability are welcome to join us to help install the mural. 

This event is wheelchair accessible, with Auslan interpreters and audio describers.

Join us for the grand launch at 3pm, Thursday 20th September.

Location: Footscray Exchange Building, 201 Nicholson St, Footscray 

This mural artwork can then be viewed in its entirely for the rest of the Fringe Festival and beyond.!!

For more info, contact Larissa MacFarlane, 0490 188 762/ 9687 3231 larissalice@gmail.com

The Overwintering Project

My printmaking practice has slowed down heaps since I started work on a big new project at Brain Injury Matters in May (more about that in another post). 

I am also currently working very hard to organise the Disability Pride is Back! community art project. Please see my last post to find out more. 

And I am really missing the thinking, experimenting and creating time that goes into making new print works, that can be so nourishing.

But somehow, I recently found the time, in snatches, to create a new linocut.

Kate Gorringe-Smith is the amazing organiser of The Overwintering Project. And I really wanted to contribute. 

So here's the result. It's a 2 block linocut. A 3rd block was planned but I ran out of time. So I kept it simple. Two of the prints of the edition of 7 have been donated to the project, to support the building of awareness of the importance of migratory birds and wetlands.

A Summer Stint in the Jaw Bone, linocut, edition of 7

"I feel lucky to live not far from some amazing wetlands in Williamstown and Altona, including the Jawbone Marine Sanctuary. Due to its history as a Rifle Range, it has been fenced off for over 80 years, protecting a distinctive and wide biodiversity, that is also home to the only remaining site of mangroves that grow on a basalt plain in Victoria. And I am grateful to all the people who have worked so hard over so many years to protect such coastal lands, as well as the ongoing work of people across the world to protect wetlands that keep not just the free global passage of migratory birds, but keep our planet alive." Larissa MacFarlane 2018