Content Warning: this article discusses ableism

Ruth Harrigan describes herself as a barrier-breaking ex-yuppie. Growing up in a conservative, middle-class Catholic household, Ruth was the first member of her family to obtain a doctorate degree. After graduating from law school she built up her own law practice—“everyone was shocked that a girl did that.” She speaks candidly of how both her tenacity and privilege were abruptly confronted when she suffered a serious spinal cord injury in her thirties. The accident left Ruth with quadriplegia, which is partial or complete paralysis of the arms, legs, and torso. Becoming disabled at this point in her life incited a new vantage point: “I had this very interesting transition I made, kind of a cultural shock, of going from being able-bodied with that privilege to disabled. And mind you, I am privileged. I have an education. I'm white. Nevertheless, I was immediately seen differently the minute I sat in a wheelchair.” 

Ruth is sitting against an animated backdrop of palm trees and a white sand shore, “We call it the shore here, not the beach” she explains in an ode to her hometown, Princeton, New Jersey. When I join the Zoom call she’s laughing, “I hope one of those coconuts doesn’t fall on my head.” We first connected on Twitter, after I put out a call for chronically ill artists to share their work during Disability Pride Month in July. So we are here to talk about art and disability, and the future of both. The cultural shock of becoming disabled, she continues, demands an adjustment to mental barriers as much as to physical, “I thought, I can’t walk, I can’t do this, I can’t do that. I got angry and stuck.” Despite progress made through the Americans with Disabilities Act[1], social inequities and ableist attitudes perpetuate, placing material and social barriers on the mobility and wellbeing of citizens with disabilities. Ruth had to change the way she practiced law because many courthouses were not accessible to wheelchair users, and clients stopped paying because as an attorney sitting in a wheelchair “the picture people would get for some reason is that my brain didn’t work”. Having lived as able-bodied, Ruth was shocked by the ableism[2] faced by people with disabilities on a regular basis. A sensitivity to her own ableism along with experiences of discrimination “drove home to me that I needed to do advocacy”. Her advocacy journey and work was greatly helped by the support of the disability community: “I highly recommend to anyone facing a disability to seek out community, because it really makes a huge difference.”

About a year ago, Ruth happened upon a head tracker device online that she purchased through the support of a fundraiser and her friends. The device attaches to a computer or tablet, and a reflective dot placed on a hat or glasses allows the user to control the cursor with their head. On a whim, she opened a painting programme one day and began to play around, “I was thrilled. I was absolutely thrilled . . . because with this disability, even though you get used to it, you still can’t move.” In comparison to her  other creative outlets—writing poetry, short stories, and composing music—painting brought the most freedom, and the most mobility. Ruth’s art reflects this newfound movement, within and beyond the boundaries of physicality. 

“Even the simplest things I paint, I see the movement. I'm still learning to convey that,” she says, describing a painting she did the other day that was “just brush strokes . . . nothing complex”. After studying the strokes, she realised that they represented something moving uphill, a feeling that resonated with her: “At the time, I was finishing up a whole lot of work. I was really tired and being tired with paralysis is challenging because things that you struggle with you tend to have to do numerous times, so when you're tired, it's like a drag and everything's uphill.”

Although hesitant to pinpoint her style—“I have not yet totally established the style . . . it's in transition”—bold colours that skid, scatter, twist, and whirl are consistent throughout her published work. A piece she has titled Orange Jazz mimics the flow of jazz music in a gesture to the experience of painting along to music, allowing herself to “get lost in the process”. Orange Jazz is “really about music, it's about the movement of the music and it's all over the place, and if you listen to jazz music, you would recognise that . . . you never know what the next musician is going to do . . . it repeats, but it repeats in different ways.” Works like Orange Jazz permit the viewer to partake in the music, which is what Ruth was striving for when she painted it, “My friends who like jazz music looked at it and got it right away.” She knew to finish the piece at that point as “it carries itself . . . people who relate to the subject find it relatable already.”

Relatability can’t be achieved through the abstract alone. On occasion, and through a desire to communicate with her viewer, Ruth opts for literal expression over that of the symbolic. Orange Jazz conveyed what she wanted—it “carried itself”—without the need for a figurative motif. Yet abstract expressionism can exclude as much as it can invite. In asking about some of her more literal artworks like Hidden Rose, she responds: “I want my art to be relatable. So when I put a hidden rose in with a lot of abstract painting, it's a way of introducing abstract painting to people who might just be looking at art with roses, or they might just be looking at realistic art, you know.” Ruth invites wide audiences into spaces that are created to convey specific experiences. Doing so successfully, therefore, requires walking a fine line between her imagination and theirs. Recently, she was experimenting with a sketch of a shopping cart, filling it with different objects. In some, she filled the cart with boxes, in others with people, their heads popping out. “It was bizarre” she chuckles, but it also made sense: having moved in a wheelchair for 28 years “there’s something about the way I see people on wheels”. In the end, Ruth only uploaded the painting of the shopping cart filled with boxes, a piece which has received praise for its form, and has been compared to works by the Spanish artist Joan Miró. However, withholding the image that resonated most with her is a choice she remains uncertain about: “People are going to make their own assumptions . . . maybe that’s for the better, or maybe I’m doing myself a disservice.” 

It is in this sense that Ruth’s head tracker art advocates on behalf of the artist and the observer. She wants people to know she is a disabled artist: “look at what I'm doing with a head tracker!”, and to ask, “How come more people don't have this head tracker? How come more disabled people aren't encouraged to do art?” At the same time,  Ruth wants her art to be accessible to the observer, because to her, the artist and the viewer are inseparable: creating art is hindered without access to art itself. For many people with disabilities, the replacement of physical events with virtual events during COVID-19 expanded their accessibility options. Generally speaking, people with disabilities face greater financial and physical barriers to attending events like art exhibitions or going to the theatre in person. Ruth says that since things moved online, “I’ve been to more concerts and more things during the pandemic than I have in the years I’ve been disabled. It's amazing the way that, you know, you're sitting there at your computer watching a ballet.” The technology to expand people’s accessibility are there—“it is not more advanced than the technology we use for everyday things”—but we have to consciously choose to implement these options, and to teach the technology to users: “You can’t just hand someone an iPad, [you have to] show them what can be done with it.” Thus, creating more opportunities for people to explore art and showing people how to use artistic tools go hand-in-hand: “It’s all a circle . . . when you observe other art it inspires your art.” Artistic symbiosis is apparent in Ruth’s experimentation with head tracker art, changing and adapting to meet the needs of the artist and the audience simultaneously. 

Beyond the abled and disabled binary, most people experience feeling stuck at times and seek a means to reimagine movement and mobility. The COVID-19 pandemic has shown many what it is like to live with limited opportunities for mobility outside the home. Ruth recalls teasing her able-bodied friends for complaining about lockdown limitations, “I was sympathetic, too, because it's hard and I didn't do it unkindly. But they got the message because now people are like, wow, so if the world opens up, what happens to folks like you?” While she shows softness towards her friends, she is hardline about the necessity of maintaining and advancing the accessibility facilitated in response to COVID-19 restrictions. With the same speed that society bent to the needs of those isolating at home during the pandemic, it is beginning to bounce back “like a rubber band to the way it was”. Social effort and emphasis is on returning to ‘normal’—a normality that is inequitable, exclusive, and ableist. Therefore, rather than aiming for a return, we could and should recognise the transformative potential in the pandemic response: “We learnt during the pandemic we can do things differently. And those things happen to be inclusive.” Ruth begins to list people to whom the public, social world is not easily accessible: people with chronic illnesses, pregnant women, parents with a disabled child, cancer patients. “And when you start thinking about that, this is what baffles me: are there more people who need these things than any of us ever imagined? And we've just had an opportunity to see that it works. So we need a conversation about this.” 

Ruth’s art expresses aspects of movement, socially and creatively, that are rarely granted attention and value. One of these is the moment of pause, consideration, and tentativeness before action itself. Near the end of our call, Ruth feigns exasperation at people’s interpretations of her piece Checkered Turtle in an Otherworldly Place. People tend to focus on the ‘checkered turtle’ but not the ‘otherworldly place’ around it, which could be viewed as “an aquarium or the ocean because some of it looks a little fake and some of it looks like nature.” The turtle is entering the frame from the left-hand side, “shyly,” and “it's sort of like, there's this wonderful world out there and like, should I? Should I go in there, you know? No one's seen that yet. I've been waiting for somebody to say “I get it! The turtle feels vulnerable!””

You can follow Ruth and view more of her head tracker art on her Instagram: @ruthharriganartist

Ruth’s art is available for sale on her website: ruth-harrigan.pixels.com

[1] The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) became law in 1990. The ADA “prohibits discrimination against individuals with disabilities in all areas of public life, including jobs, schools, transportation, and all public and private places that are open to the general public. The purpose of the law is to make sure that people with disabilities have the same rights and opportunities as everyone else.” However, in practice, the ADA is rarely enforced through legal initiative, instead enforcement relies on those who have disabilities and disability groups to implement change through advocacy, using the ADA to legitimise their complaint or proposal.

[2] There are many definitions of ableism, a term used to describe social and individual discriminations against people with disabilities in favour of those who are considered able-bodied. I like this one from Andrew Pulrang: “Social habits, practices, regulations, laws, and institutions that operate under the assumption that disabled people are inherently less capable overall, less valuable in society, and/or should have less personal autonomy than is ordinarily granted to people of the same age.”