Abnormal: Towards a Scientific Model of Disability

ABNORMAL
Towards a Scientific Model of Disability

This is a digital photographic image, manipulated to look, on close examination, more like a painting. An olive-skinned woman with a mild spinal curvature is standing sideways on to the onlooker, against a white background. She is dressed in a white sports bra and briefs, with her feet together and her hands at her sides. On her left shoulder is a tattoo in bright red-orange colours of a fox's head, and there is a chain bracelet on her left wrist. She has very short dark red hair, but her features are obscured by a fake fur mask of a fox's head, fixed by a white band around the back of her head. Behind her, her shadow is animalistic and vaguely threatening. In the bottom left corner of the image, the word 'Abnormal' is stamped out in black capital letters in an old-fashioned typewriter-like print. There are similarities between this pose and the traditional poses of disabled people in medical photographs.

Abnormal 1: Lambda print on aluminium. © ju90.07

Welcome to the Abnormal website, which functions as an online catalogue for the Abnormal exhibition and as a Home Page for the associated work. Abnormal developed from Ju Gosling aka ju90's artist's residency at the National Institute of Medical Research (NIMR), which took place between 2006 - 2007. Funded by the Wellcome Trust, the residency explored ideas about normality, and asked whether there is a 'Scientific Model of Disability' that is distinct from the 'Medical Model of Disability'? The exhibition toured nationally from 2008-2012, click here for further details.

Click here to find out more about Ju's practice by reading her Abnormal Conversation with Professor Jim Hunter, Deputy Principal, Arts Institute Bournemouth, which took place while the exhibition toured to Bournemouth in spring 2009. Click here to find out more about the relationship between the exhibition and wider scientific themes and art practice by reading Ju's speech to the Superhuman: Revolution of the Species symposium in Melbourne on 23 November 2009.

Click here to read a review in The Lancet
Click here to read a review on Culture 24
Click here to read a review on Roves and Roams
Click here to read a review in Disability Now
Click here to read a review in the British Medical Journal

The accompanying book ABNORMAL: How Britain became body dysphoric and the key to a cure is available now in a limited edition hardback containing images from the exhibition. £20 inc UK P&P (email the publishers for overseas postage rates) or for just £3.09 for the Kindle.

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