Photo credit: Rachel Gadsden
Learn about her creative journey, disability rights, and how she brings lived experience into mainstream art.
For visual and performance artist Rachel Gadsden, art is never purely decorative, it is an unfiltered narrative of human existence. “My work is about people and it's a narrative,” Rachel explains. “It’s sort of storytelling… telling stories about the human condition.”
How it all began
Rachel’s path into the arts was far from conventional. Trained in drama first, a lung condition in her early twenties led to sudden organ failure. Unable to tour, she turned to visual art and studied anatomy at University College London, where she did a lot of drawing.
When retinosis caused progressive sight loss fifteen years ago, her creative practice underwent another transformation. She started treating the canvas like a stage, bringing body movement directly into her performance art. “When my sight started to go, it gave me the freedom to just say it really doesn’t matter,” she reflects. “All the big awards I’ve received have been since that point onwards.”
Rather than concealing her medical equipment, she decided to incorporate it into her performances. He crutches, corsets and pumps become directly a part of the show.
“Why am I hiding it all? You don’t become the victim-hero. You’re taking agency of it and you’re not weakening your situation. You’re actually showing it as a powerful strength.”
Rachel’s achievements reflect her impact as both an artist and a role model. She won the disability role model award at the National Diversity Awards in 2013 and received an honorary doctorate from London South Bank University in 2016, calling it “the biggest shock” in her life and “a real proud moment”.
Defending disabled lives
Her recent projects keep her at the forefront of community art and disability activism. She recently created the Croydon Masterpiece with the National Gallery’s Art On Your Doorstep project, embedding drawings from hundreds of local residents into four large-scale paintings. “I like the fact that I’ve got my artist voice,” she says. “But I want other people’s voices to be heard.”
Her powerful performance ‘Posthuman’ grew out of a distressing encounter early in the pandemic, when a doctor informed her she would not receive resuscitation if she caught COVID-19. “I don’t think you have a right to do this to me,” Rachel told her doctor. “I’m an artist, so I have to respond as an art piece.”
Created alongside composer Freddie Meyers and CRIPtic Arts director Jamie Hale, the piece uses live painting, sign language projections, and music to defend disabled lives. Staged at the Barbican, it also featured as a film in University College London's Words Matter exhibition.
Having completed commissions for every Paralympic Games since Beijing 2008, Gadsden recently collaborated with blind poet Dave Steele on a Paris Paralympics community project. Today, she is completing a practice-based PhD at Loughborough University on body constriction and disability arts.
Her message for disabled creatives remains clear: “Our voices need to be louder now than ever.”
Visit the Rachel Gadsden website to find out more about her upcoming performances and exhibitions.