The following text is Persimmon’s artist statement written for the Disability Arts and Activism Archive, followed by follow-up questions via interview with Q.

My Constructed History

I've been an artist for 51 years. I've had a psych diagnosis for 54 years. I've had a learning disability for 72 years. I've had kidney disease for 17 years. Some of these things work better together than others.

Being a white middle class kid with a learning disability goes really well with becoming an artist, or at least it did for me. My parents assumed my sister would go to university, where she would excel and then get a well-paying professional job. Which she did. I fulfilled many of my parents’ expectations for me as well, such as never going to college, never learning to drive and never having a "real" job. Instead, after high school I took a lot of drugs and worked as a house cleaner, and then in my early 20’s, I started making art. And so instead of the usual parental pressure to put that foolish art idea aside and get a real job, I had parents who were thrilled and relieved when I became an artist. It was upward mobility beyond their wildest dreams for me.

Actually, going crazy was good for art as well. The first time I flipped out, art was the only thing that helped me feel better, and art was the thing that eventually brought me back from that space. So I kept on making art, with stellar discipline, cause it felt like the alternative was going back to that awful place. Like they say, Tangled: art and disability.

Art and disability is what I’m going to talk about today: specifically my visual art that’s on the subject of disability, which spans decades, cause I’m very old, but also leaves out a lot of stuff, like my work with the notorious Kiss & Tell collective, stuff about prison, anti-war stuff, etc.

The first series on disability I made was just after I got out of art school, in 1977, for a show with ex-inmate artist and researcher Portland Frank. Portland was the first artist I knew personally who tackled issues of disability in her work. She put together a bibliography of anti-psychiatry writing and resources, which she illustrated with stunning woodcuts. It was published by Press

Gang Publishers, a feminist press that frequently published work concerning disability issues. Two of its leading staff were people with disabilities.

The art show was Portland’s woodcuts, plus a series of my small clay sculptures. These sculptures came out of a job I’d had the year before, working at Woodlands, a custodial institution where people labelled intellectually disabled were locked up. (People I know with that label reject it, and call themselves self advocates, so that’s the terminology I’ll use from here on).

I got the job at Woodlands because I said I’d worked with teenagers with learning disabilities at a psych clinic. Actually, I’d been a patient there, but I knew the jargon and the routines well enough to bullshit my way into a job at one of the most horrifying institutions in Canada. I learned many things there, like that it doesn’t matter what a nice person you are, being staff in a place like that means you’re an agent of oppression. It’s in the job description, look it up.

Eventually, I tackled that theme, and Woodlands, in depth, but in this early work, I was trying to portray the endless boredom and neglect that infused the halls of Woodlands.

This work was small and made of painted clay. When I first went to art school I was working in welded metal, but the most challenging and inspiring sculpture teacher at Emily Carr back then was Sally Michener, who worked in the ceramics department, so I drifted into clay under her influence, and I worked in clay until the late 80’s, when I liberated myself from all things breakable.

After the little Woodlands series, I did this kind of dyke circus that was all colour and movement and fun, and then I didn’t know what to do. I was flailing around, knowing my art needed to change, but not knowing how. I was ready for something new, ready to be inspired, and luckily for me, Vancouver artist and writer Sky Lee came along and blew me right away. All my art owes a big debt to her.

In her series Iron Chink, she combined text with imagery, which wasn't done much back in the seventies, unless the text was illegible. But Sky Lee spoke volumes about the erasure of Chinese/Canadian experience, through a brief story about breakfast foods in grade school, written over a pencil drawing of a young boy. The evocative portrait combined with the direct specificity of the story, the restless texture of handwriting echoing the tense pencil marks of the figure, it was a revelation. I wanted words.

Not my words though. I wasn’t a writer. I had a learning disability that made putting thoughts in linear order difficult. But I knew someone who might share some words with me. I asked my friend Sheila Gilhooly if we could do a few pieces together, with me making sculpture and her writing about the 3 years she spent in and out of mental hospitals for being a lesbian. By 1984, we had 25 pieces, completing the sculptural memoir Still Sane. The sculptures are life-size, painted or glazed clay, press-molded into casts of Sheila’s body, with her words written on or around them.

One of the most satisfying moments of my life was when the head of the Canadian Psychiatric Association was harassed into apologizing to Sheila on CBC TV by an angry reporter who’d read the book Press Gang Publishers made of our show.

Sheila and I are both super proud of Still Sane. We also both have criticisms of it. We made it in the early 80’s, things look a bit more complicated from where we are now. These days, Sheila doesn’t think it was really being a lesbian that got her locked up. It was being a butch lesbian. Her gender non conformity was the crucial piece the psych system was trying to change.

We’re also both critical of the ending, which was like: "I was saved from homophobia and the mental hospital by getting a feminist analysis and they all lived happily ever after.” Perhaps it was the times, back then. We thought there could be clear solutions, and answers that stayed answered, instead of dissolving into a whole new set of questions.

But ex-patients who praised the work in public, talked to us in private about times in their lives when feminists had colluded with homophobia and with the psychiatric system. They talked about pain that persists despite your right-on analysis, and about the long struggle to embrace craziness rather than grasping after socially defined sanity. And also: I had another breakdown. So much for happily ever after.

I thought I’d never go crazy again because I came out and became a feminist. Oh yeah. My next series, Crow Advises Me to Jump, is the story of my second breakdown, in 1986. It was a long, bitter, brutal time. I lost a few friends and a whole lot of certainty. Going crazy can be... helpful in that way.

Crow Advises Me to Jump is about being seen as crazy, and ultimately finding strength in the very things you've been judged for. It’s about how right-on dykes can also participate in labeling and silencing mad people. The pieces are very small, made of painted clay, with the title of each piece written on the side of the base, telling a little story about a hallucination I once had.

I love this series, but I do have some serious criticisms of it. Like I said, the story was based on a hallucination I had during my second breakdown and there really was a crow in it. But for anyone who’s not a close personal friend, that’s invisible, and it ends up being totally an appropriation of the trickster crow from First Nations’ culture. And that’s underlined and made explicit by me naming the bird “Crow” instead of calling it “a crow” or “the crow”.

Really, it wouldn’t have diminished the piece if I had changed the hallucination into a sparrow or a grackle. It would have been stronger, even, coming across as an odd, humorous personal element rather than a shallow invocation of a cultural touchstone that I have no connection to.

Also, Crow Advises me to Jump is super undercover. It deals with issues obliquely, with humour and fantasy. That’s not a criticism of the art, the humour is part of its strength.

But I recognize how unexposed I am in it, compared to how Sheila was in Still Sane. No matter how “in this together” it felt in the studio, once Still Sane was out in the world, there was a power dynamic, where Sheila revealed her life and I remained at a "professional distance." Reviews and interviews in mainstream outlets often portrayed me as a kind of artist/social worker helping this unfortunate woman tell her sad sad story. Crow Advises me to Jump continued to keep me hidden.

So in my next series, Sunnybrook, I changed that. I started Sunnybrook in 1990, and many things had changed. I had learned to use a computer, which helped my writing disability incredibly. Writing my own words now seemed possible. And there was a story that had had haunted me for years, since the late 70’s when I made that first institution series: the story of when I worked at Woodlands, which I now renamed Sunnybrook to avoid lawsuits. Believe me, if I had known there was a Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto, I would have named it something else. But it was just one of those pastoral names they always use: Woodlands, Riverview, Glendale, Tranquille...

The pieces are made of wood paneling, cut into shapes with a scroll saw, and set into open-fronted boxes and painted. The show had 25 pieces, and an enormous amount of text, printed on tear-off sheets next to the sculptures and recorded as audio with a full cast of actors playing the different characters. It was later turned into a book (with an enormous amount of pictures) by Press Gang Publishers.

Sunnybrook is all about power imbalances: between people with learning disabilities and neurotypical folks, between self advocates and people labeled learning disabled, between inmates and outpatients, between women of colour and white women, between social workers and orderlies. Etc.

Sunnybrook’s subtitle is “a true story with lies” and the text plays with truth and lies and the vast plain between them. Truth is constantly questioned and undermined by the marginal counter-narrative that runs alongside the main story. In part that’s because it’s the story of a woman with invisible disabilities, and lying is our super power. We learn to lie to stay invisible. We learn to nod and smile and allow assumptions, and slip away, unseen. It’s a bitter privilege. The main character is an accomplished liar, who lies her way into a job, and lies to keep it, and all too often believes her own lies. The story of her corruption by the institution is inseparable from the story of her attempt to pass as normal.

The other part of the lying thing in Sunnybrook is because the meaning of a true story had changed.

By the early nineties, many things had changed in the world and in this different context, there were new problems with my old art strategies. Still Sane and the later series Doing Time worked as breaking silence. My collaborators were talking about areas of their lives that had been hidden, shamed, made unspeakable, and there was an incredible power and freedom in breaking open those constraints.

But by the 90’s, silence had been replaced by sensationalism. TV talk shows were using people's pain as "entertainment" for mainstream audiences. The experiences of variously marginalized people were no longer unspeakable but were packaged as titillating, weird, exotic fare for normelles to consume. Real life stories had a particular cache. So in Sunnybrook, the deliberate confusion about what really happened and what’s a lie serves to undermine the sensationalism of the time.

While I was working on Sunnybrook, I talked with several self advocate activists who gave me invaluable feedback, and brought other people and groups to see the show. One group was the [BC] Self Advocacy Foundation, self advocates and allies who were part of the effort to close all of BC’s big institutions. Which finally happened in 1996, with the closure of Woodlands.

Meanwhile, the Self Advocacy Foundation was collecting oral histories from former inmates, with the long range goal of public acknowledgement of abuse, followed by reparations. They decided that rather than publishing a book of the oral histories, they would do an art show, and they asked me to work on it with them.

From the Inside Out was the result, the most amazing collaboration I’ve ever been part of. I could talk for hours about my collaborators, the process, the public reaction. Barring that, I’d encourage you to see the video of From the Inside Out, made by Lorna Boschman. It really captures the anger, the pain and the outrageous humour of the project.

The art that we made for this project was a series of mixed media murals, four feet tall and around 14 feet long. The murals are made of layers of acetate, stretched over photographs. The bottom layer, against the wall, is made up of large photographs, mostly of Woodlands, taken by photographer Pat Fiendel. These are illegal pictures.

The board that controlled the Woodlands’ property after its closure was very protective of Woodland’s “reputation” and didn’t allow access to the grounds or their archives to anyone who might be critical. So Pat Fiendel was smuggled into Woodlands by a TV crew working on an altogether different project, and she wandered the grounds taking these amazing, horrifying photos. And discovering things like the graveyard... where headstones from a hundred years and thousands of deaths at Woodlands, had been dug up and made into a barbeque patio for the staff. Which outraged the ex-inmates on our steering committee so much that they spearheaded a project which resulted in a beautiful memorial park, built on city land, honouring the dead of Woodlands and confronting the desecration of the original graveyard.

Like I said, so many stories.

The second layer of each mural was a sheet of clear acetate, laid over the photographs in our art-making workshops. The ex-inmate artists used pictures of themselves, oil pastels, markers and cut outs superimposed on the grim buildings, to tell the story of their time inside, or to rewrite their stories from a position of power, or to ignore the buildings and tell new stories of their lives on the outside. The last layer was another acetate with the text they chose to add about their art and their memories.

When From the Inside Out opened in 1998, BC Ombudsman Dulcie McCallum was taken on a special tour of the show by some of the self advocate artists, and presented with a copy of all their oral histories. In 2001, McCallum submitted a report on the systemic, physical, emotional and sexual abuse at Woodlands. In 2002, a class action lawsuit was launched against the provincial government on behalf of former residents. By 2010, reparations were approved. In 2011, the last building of the Woodlands complex was demolished, as self advocates and allies looked on. Happy ending.

Kind of. Except these days, re-institutionalization into giant “group homes” is being sold by governments as fiscally sensible, and the struggle continues. Never forget. Never go back. Never go back.

In 2004 I started some more personal art, a series that included portraits of my grandmother who was a psych inmate, my father, also a psych inmate, my mother who had a learning disability, and myself, as a kid beaten for my learning disability and as an adult learning to deal with kidney failure.

After that I did a much cheerier series about friends with disabilities: Pat, Ben, Bonnie, Jean, lots of Reverend Dave, a whole life story for Geoff.

In 2008, Geoff (same Geoff), Geoff McMurchy was planning an art show for Kickstart called Heroics, to coincide with Vancouver’s hosting of the Paralympics. This being Geoff, the theme was meant to question the concept of heroic disability.

Since Sunnybrook, my work had been based in 2D cut outs. At the time of Heroics, I was just finishing a series about the US/Iraq war, with scans of raw meat cut out and turned into flags. That series had crows too, but this time the crows were explicitly based in the Celtic mythology of my own background, the battlefield scavengers of Macha and Morrigan.

But at this point I needed a change and Geoff’s show provided the impetus for a return to 3D figurative sculpture. I made sculptures of acrobats, out of driftwood combined with various found objects, mostly from the excellent recycling depot of Hornby Island where I live.

I used acrobatics as a metaphor for day to day life with a disability. For many of us, just getting through the day can require feats of agility, creativity and balance. The result is mundane: we get out of bed (maybe), we get dressed (maybe), we brush our teeth (maybe) – but the process can be as complex and demanding as a triple somersault on a trapeze. And sometimes we fall.

It takes an acrobat to operate in a world that’s not set up to accommodate our disabilities. In this series, I wanted to celebrate the creativity of our day to day acrobatics, but in the same breath critique the systems that force us to fly or fall.

I had just started Acrobatics and was still finishing Flags of our Fathers when Tempest Grace Gale was murdered. She was a young artist on Hornby, who I once had mentored, and who had then turned into an equal colleague who helped me as much as I helped her. Then this asshole killed her. A week and a half later, another friend, Catherine White Holman, died in a plane crash. A month later, my girlfriend Della developed a brain condition which gave her an ongoing series of small strokes. So, you know, stuff got hard.

During this time, working on the Acrobats was one of the only things that made sense to me. It was still about disability, but it was also about Catherine, and Tempest, and Della. The whole way I work changed during that time.

A year later, Gallery Gachet, Vancouver’s mad art gallery asked me to be in a show about psych diagnosis. I wanted to do the show, but I just couldn’t figure out what people flying from trapezes had to do with diagnosis. Change was needed. This time it was my close colleague, SD Holman, Catherine’s partner, who pushed me into a new place. “Put more carving in it. Carve everything!” they insisted whenever I whined to her about my art troubles. So the diagnosis series, and Constructed Identities which followed, have way more carving. Which I curse Sid for every day I spend sanding. And sanding. And sanding. (They like that).

The diagnosis series was also the origin of cutting off the tops of heads, which I do obsessively throughout my more recent work. Some figures have multiple interchangeable head tops, which refers to the flock of diagnoses that follow some of us around, as shrink after shrink give us label after label. It can be hard to hold onto your head when a series of socially endorsed Experts each give you a new name and expect you to answer to it.

Constructed Identities was when I really got a handle on this new style. The series started with a piece called What She Gave Me, though I didn’t know I was starting a new series when I started the piece. It was built around a doll’s leg that Tempest had among her art supplies. After her death, her mom gave me all the junk off of Tempest’s work bench, including that leg. I had used doll parts in the diagnosis series, but working with that leg, and thinking about what Tempest might have done with it (so different from what I did) was full of intense feelings for me, and after that, dolls became a dominant part of the figures, as they were in Tempest’s art. Her dolls are full of angry humour and pain, the work of a gender fluid artist who had dolls shoved at him as an act of social control in his boy-identified childhood and who ripped dolls into art as a girl-identified young adult. My dolls are different, the constructions of a cis femme, based in a defiant reclaiming and valourization of the feminine.

What She Gave Me was also the first piece I mounted directly on the wall, abandoning the architectural bases of the diagnosis series, and in that too, it was the prototype for all the pieces in Constructed Identities.

My most recent work is the series Speak No (emergency), which is about climate change. In it, I’m seeking to make disability a central part of the discussion, instead of a separate little issue, off to the side, not implicated in the major crises our world faces. This series continues the use of materials that are culturally considered broken and useless; treated as treasures in a metaphor for pride in our disabled bodies. I’m still cutting off and replacing the tops of heads, to signify psych diagnoses. Many figures appear to use wheelchairs or other accommodations. Key phrases in braille are embedded in some panels. Panels like Heat (death) directly address the particular impact of climate change on people with disabilities. This is a strategy for centring disability, rather than treating it as a marginal “special interest”. Climate justice is not separate from disability justice. As US Representative Ayanna Pressley says, “Every policy issue is a disability issue.” This work also reflects the progression of my peripheral neuropathy – as the nerves in my hands get progressively more numb, my art becomes wilder, freer, less formal.

    Follow-up questions with Q: