When able-bodied individuals look at Paralympians what do they see? The athlete? The disability? Neither? Do we even register the powerful movement of their disfigured limbs or the muscles valiantly compensating for the lack of them? Are we too embarrassed to look?
Simon McKeown, an artist with a disability, wants everyone to take a good, hard look. In fact, the more you stare, the better. By creating digital avatars of seven Great Britain athletes competing at the London Games, as well as Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson, the country’s most successful Paralympian, he hopes that people will take note of the precision and skill involved in their pursuits.
“It’s about demystifying physical differences,” he says. “I want to showcase what’s physically attractive about their movements, despite their non-standard physical form.”
McKeown’s subjects included Danielle Brown, an archer who won an Olympic gold medal in the individual compound event in Beijing four years ago and a team gold at the Commonwealth Games in 2010. The 23-year-old first-class law graduate has reflex sympathetic dystrophy, a chronic, progressive disease that means she is in almost constant pain from her swollen feet. She shoots arrows sitting or leaning on a stool.
“A lot of people just see an archer, but when you know she does it under huge stress, it becomes all the more impressive,” says McKeown, a reader in post-production and animation at Teesside University. “Most Paralympians do things that most able-bodied people couldn’t hope to do.”
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Other competitors to be featured in his digital installation are Ali Jawad, the powerlifter, who was born without legs; Hannah Stodel, a world-champion sailor born without her lower right arm; Anton Raimondo, a sitting volleyball player who lost his lower left leg in a motorbike crash; Danny Nobbs, a shot-putter paralysed in a motorbike accident; Kenny Churchill, a triple Paralympic javelin champion with cerebral palsy; and Rob Richardson, the captain of the sitting volleyball team who had a leg amputated below the right knee.
They were taken to Pinewood Studios, in Buckinghamshire, where they were dressed in Velcro suits and had about 45 motion sensors attached to their major joints to capture their movements in 3-D. It is the same technology that turned Andy Serkis, the British actor, into Gollum for the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes and King Kong for the eponymous film.
Baroness Grey-Thompson describes it as a “surreal” experience. “I’ve never done anything like it,” she says. “I had a bit of a struggle getting into the Velcro suit.”
Born with spina bifida, the 11-times Paralympic wheelchair racing champion hopes that the project, funded by the Arts Council as part of the Cultural Olympiad, will help people to see disability from a fresh perspective. “We try to gloss over disability,” she says. “In a racing chair, most of my body is hidden. This is a way of highlighting the difference in individuals.”
It will be difficult to ignore McKeown’s work, entitled Motion Disabled: Unlimited. The central piece is a ten-metre high inflatable sculpture of a thalidomide victim kick-boxing, created from the captured motion of Mat Fraser, the actor. It will be displayed in towns along the Torch Relay route and the images of the avatars projected on to buildings.
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“It’s kind of in-your-face,” Grey-Thompson says. “Some people might be shocked by it and others will say, ‘Wow, that’s a different way of looking at it’. I would rather someone not like it than have no emotion about it. People walk past me looking out of the corner of their eye. If you are a thalidomide victim people want to look, but they don’t really want to look. It’s rude to stare. Because this is art, it’s acceptable to look.”
McKeown, 46, has brittle bones — or osteogenesis imperfecta, to give it its proper name — and was born into a family where he was surrounded by disability. The genetic condition put his grandfather in a wheelchair and meant that his uncle had two wooden legs. He has broken more than 100 bones in his body since birth, so he grew up lacking the discriminatory attitude towards disability that wider society fosters.
His message is that disabled people are more normal than we believe they are. He hopes that sport will break down barriers in the way that football helped to improve the representation of black people.
“Everyone dies and age and disease means that many people will become disabled,” he says. “Disability is a huge part of the population. It is crazy to pretend it doesn’t exist. We should celebrate our biodiversity. The Paralympics does this and I hope it has a permanent effect and creates a cultural shift.”