Ju Gosling talks about her journey as a multidisciplinary artist

I originally trained as a dancer, and that I suppose was probably my primary art form and what I thought I would be doing as an artist on growing up. I mean I also used to write stories and plays and I used to paint. I also did music but, again, off the back of dancing.

I developed Scheuermann’s Disease as a teenager. After this, I was shuffled into dance teaching. I knew I didn’t want to do that. I was really unaware that it was the back problems that were affecting the way I was being perceived as an artist.
I’d always had an interest in theatre, and had been doing stage management with a local rep and a local amateur company from about the age of 12. I’d become interested in film so I suppose my initial kind of redirection then was into film and television. Of course, given how hard it is to get into film and TV in this country, I ended up doing the classic kind of lower-middle class/working-class media person thing and going into print journalism. I still had in mind that I’d like to move into television, and had been working as a social affairs freelance, and got asked as a result of that level of expertise into TV. So I was working in social affairs documentaries for about a year, but that’s when my spinal condition became really acute and then chronic. And consequently, I didn’t get any more jobs in television, even though the next series that the company was making was actually on the history of disability! They still felt I was too disabled to be able to work on it.

Before I went freelance I worked in housing journalism, first for a tenants’ organisation and then for Shelter. I then started doing a part-time MA in Cultural Studies which I finished in ’92, and then moved on to a PhD in Communication and Image Studies. At that point, I discovered hypermedia. When working as a journalist, I’d been taking my own photographs. I’d been going to classes at the London Cartoon Centre and had been working with another woman as a cartoonist. At the time there was still a culture of specialisation: you didn’t pursue more than one discipline. I was heading for 30, and what I really liked about Hypermedia, or Web Design as it’s now become, is that it wove together many disciplines: writing, production editing, photography, video, cartooning … I thought, great, I’ll specialise in hypermedia because it’s going to take in all of those interests. On finishing my PhD, I was looking for some sort of freelance job that would bring in quite a bit of money, having massive student debts as you do.
I had written the PhD as a website and a 1-hour film, which straight away went on exhibition at Cyberia Café and got reviewed in the Times and the Guardian, and then people started talking about that as being art. Whilst finishing the PhD I was working part-time at Falmouth College of Art, where I created a website called My Not-so-secret Life as a Cyborg, which again started getting international recognition as an art piece. At the same point I think a combination of age, gender and disability discrimination, as well as obviously having some personal limits, meant that I couldn't get anything that paid really well, but I was getting more and more interest in my work as an artist.

Around 1997, I started realising how much being a dancer informed what I did, and in 1999 I started becoming really interested in exploring movement as a disabled artist. In 2001, after I’d been really ill, I thought I’d really like to do something new and I went back to music. I've been studying music composition with Drake ever since, and I’ve done the soundtracks for two of my pieces, and I think it’s all blossomed from there. I suppose about 2002 I started thinking actually I didn’t simply want to do work that was internet-based: I wanted to look at screens that were bigger than you as opposed to you dominating the screen, but also looking at more mixed-media work and looking at printing things up and doing more gallery-based work. So I’m currently working on some live performance – which, again, I didn’t used to do, but people would say ‘oh you’re a performance artist’ thinking this means you perform on the stage. Then I had a commission (Faltered States) from the Science Museum and Apples and Snakes at the beginning of last year to do a 15-minute performance around objects in the Science Museum collection.

My performance was Wheels on Fire, which I've recently performed in Zurich, so at the moment I’m doing gallery-based work, and I had my first solo show as part of the Xposure festival last October at the Oval House.

I’m hoping to do more film dance pieces: I’ve just done a piece for Bradford City Council which was a commission for European Year of Disabled People, a 3-minute film dance piece called Opening Doors. It’s just been projected outside in their City Square for four nights, opened by the Lord Mayor, which was slightly surreal, and the opening took place just before the snow storms hit.

I did a sort of sub-Bhangra version of a waltz which was speeded up for the soundtrack, so yes, I’m back, I suppose, to working in all the areas that I've ever wanted to work in but quite unexpectedly.

For Opening Doors, I downloaded the Midi files from a Schumann Waltz and then reprogrammed it all so it was a 7-minute waltz that I rearranged into 3 minutes, and then speeded up and changed the instruments so the lead instrument’s a sitar. I hadn’t realised how much the waltz is used in fairground music. So it had a real fairground feel to it which I thought really brought out the kind of freakshow history of disabled people, and became kind of more appropriate than I thought. I really picked it because to waltz means to roll or to glide, which I thought was really appropriate for wheelchair dance.

As part of my music training with Drake Music, the first thing I did was a soundtrack for a film dance piece called Fight, which was a 6-minute piece commissioned for the Adorn/Equip exhibition. So it toured nationally for a year but in fact it’s kind of developed a life of its own, because when it was commissioned it was very much that one national tour, but since then it’s also been shown in London, Austria and Liverpool, and seems to carry on.

Would you describe a lot of your work as being political?
I think it’s that usual question – what do you mean by politics? What I do say is that the majority of my work is informed by the theory and traditions of the disability arts movement, and then of course the disability arts movement is very much starting from a social model perspective, so is innately political. Sometimes things are overtly political: I was commissioned to do a piece of online art for Graz in Austria last year because it was European Capital of Culture. There’d been a lot of discussion around continental Europeans not understanding the social model, and I thought that if we don’t exchange our theories and philosophies, it’s very hard to know why they would, particularly as it’s developed from an American concept. So that was to me a very overtly political piece, which uses dolls to illustrate the different models of disability, with a play on ‘models’; and using one-liners that can then be translated into different languages. So there’s a German version that’s gone down very well, but I’ve also got people working on other translations so I hope eventually it will have all the main European languages. I then was invited out to Graz to talk about the work, so at that point I was able to give a lecture of which the English text is attached to the website that really expanded on that. And that I would say is very political, but other things I think are far less obvious.

One thing that’s really interesting about the disability arts movement is that it’s a very different perspective on art as a whole. On the one hand, the subject matter is very much what we would call the subject matter of mainstream art: the body, landscape, birth, life, death and so on. But I think the perspective is very different and it’s recently become clear to me how much it actually affects things like colour and aesthetics.
If you look at colour theory and the history of art, it’s very much seen as the mind being rational and the body irrational. The body is represented by unconstrained colour and therefore you should work with colour in particular scales and so forth. But we, of course, don’t believe that thought is rational – that the mind is always rational. We don’t care if the mind is rational or not, and we don’t care about restraining our bodies, we’re quite happy to see the unrestrained body, and I think that’s really reflected in a different use of colour, for example. Now, somewhere along the line that’s political, but in fact its also a very strong aesthetic of our arts movement.

I think you can see work from disabled artists that doesn’t appear to be political in any way but if you actually analyse things like the use of colour, you’d see that really it was and is quite distinct. Having said that, I feel very strongly that disability arts should also be seen as part of the mainstream. I think it’s ridiculous when you go to things like the Tate Modern Gallery on the body and there's no mention of disability. It’s very much the same the world over: they’re only interested ultimately in the classical male body. Disability arts doesn’t get in yet these days contemporary art is so interested in issues around the body and identity. It seems absolutely daft.

I see no opposition between disability arts and the mainstream. I think disability arts ought to be recognised as part of the mainstream because it's dealing with the same topics – very much the same topics when you come onto the body and identity. This is a leading theme in contemporary arts and yet we’re still being completely excluded.

I do respect artists who say ‘I don't want to be seen as a disabled artist, I want to be seen as an artist.’
But then I think, in reality, you’ve got to see that the artist has always been defined as being white, as being heterosexual, as being male. If you are a woman artist you’re already defined as not being an artist, and therefore I have a lot of pride in saying I am a disabled artist as an individual and I’m proud to be associated with the whole disability community. People are more likely to refer to me as ‘you know, that lesbian disabled artist’ as opposed to merely as an artist.

Being a woman and being a lesbian are also important to my identity. It’s a mistake to assume that simply because you have a strong identity as a disabled person, you don’t have other strong identities. I think it’s much easier for a straight white disabled man to say ‘I'm just an artist’ than it is for a woman – you only have to look at the statistics on how many works by women are in collections, how many works by women are on display, how many works by women are written about …
I’m already a minority, so it wouldn’t make a difference.