Artist's Statement: "Slope Audio"

Sara Hendren

I'm interested in critical/cultural prostheses, “universal” architectural structures, and public interventions about the ways communities comprehend, manage and medicalize disability. Disability concerns are inseparably entwined with the built environment and the public display of the embodied self; my work in public and collaborative art engages performative issues and perceptions about ability and disability, dependence and autonomy, especially as it plays out in the rationally and economically ordered city.

As an artist, writer, and lecturer thinking about prosthetics, I’m interested in trying to connect critical disability studies with the regnant popular cultural obsessions around the post-human, which commonly ignore our uglier collective repulsions around slowness, “abnormalcy,” and interdependent agency. I want to make work that intervenes in these gaps between queries in disability research and the more fashionable discourses about cybernetics and virtuality—both in art and in engineering cultures.