Disability Arts Cymru commission

By Bethan Parry, Senior Technician Demonstrator in Jewellery and Metalwork

How my art practice reflects my experience as a disabled person. I have comorbid mental health conditions and chronic illness.

My arts practice
I am a mixed media artist making art jewellery, wearables and interactive objects. I am inspired by childhood and play; creating oversized pieces to make the wearer feel small and/or inspired by games and childhood activities.

My work always starts as a feeling or emotion I would like to recreate and capture in a piece. My see-saw shoes were a development from wanting to recreate the feeling of being a child and shuffling around in adult shoes.

I want the pieces from this project to express the feeling of pure joy in childhood spinning, to make yourself dizzy by rolling down a hill, or going really fast on the roundabout.

What work I plan to produce and how it reflects my experience as a disabled person
The work I plan to create are a pair of wearable, interactive pieces of sculpture. Based on a combination of the maypole, fun fair swing chairs and zoetrope’s’. Making a bird in flight from still images, in textile with freestyle embroidery, as the wearer spins the birds rise and creates a sense that the bird is flying (please see attached maquette picture). The second will be of a running horse.

When you grow up as a child with (then undiagnosed) mental health disabilities, you feel that you never really fit in, that you don’t belong, and the incessant bullying from your peers at school, the negative comments about your personality or behaviour at home, solidifies and reinforces this belief.
 
All the ways you see people behaving in the world around you, from TV and media, other people’s relationships; you feel that you are deeply broken but can’t make sense of this or understand why. You lose the ability to play and take pleasure from your space in the world.

My art practice could have gone in a completely different direction, focusing on the negatives and sadness of me trying to exist and find my place in the world. Instead, I focus on the playful, the silliness, the joy, replenishing the things that were lost to me.”

They are collectively known as ‘Troi a throi, a throi fel hyn.’ 

The starling in flight is ‘Drudwy Branwen’, ‘Branwen’s Starlings’ and the carousel is ‘Ceffylau Mair’, ‘Mary’s Horses’. 
 

Materials used: 
Fabric, embroidery threads, pipe cleaners, long grain rice, toy stuffing, magnetic snap fastenings, webbing strap, sectional hula hoop, orthodontic stainless-steel wire, brass wire, sterling silver wire.

Each of the individually crafted birds and horses can be removed and worn as a brooch. 

  
Photos: Joseph Lee
More of my work Instagram @bethanparrymakes