Wheeltrails 2022

Wheeltrails is a performance that creates an excuse to dance in public spaces, exploring the wheelchair's movement as a creative body and its interaction with the design of the physical world. Providing a creative tool to explore and express how the physical environment hinders and enables the joy of wheelchairs in motion.

Being in public is not for the sake of visbility, its about occurring in the spaces that reflect societies attitudes to access. Public spaces through design can create barriers and micro-aggresssions that tell wheelchair users they do not belong. Dancing and drawing is a response challenging the ownership of behaviour by public space.

The trails created are digital street art attached to physical spaces, which provides a way without permission to respond creatively to the barriers society creates for wheeled motion.

Southbank Centre / London - Unlimited Festival 2022

Wheeltrails was run as a collective wheelchair drawing project @ Unlimited Festival 2022. Participants used Augmented reality and phone sensors to draw through the motion of their wheelchair. Each participant picked the style and the words they wanted to put to their trails and the space.

The wheeltrails created take what is inherently very clear to me, that wheelchair motion is joyful and turn this into a digital form. A celebration of disabled joy, it makes me smile every time I see them.

Digital wheelchair trail sculptures

3D Interactive model of all wheelchair trails: https://wheeltrails.art/trails/all.html

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Support

Commissioned and supported by Unlimited, celebrating the work of disabled artists, with funding from SouthBank Centre and Arts Council England.