Ann Whitehurst

We are Diversity. The experience of people who exemplify diversity can liberate the world. Disability is political and cultural.

To be an artist is to question, explore, experiment, dream, research and invent. I witness from a varied, complex experience: under class, female, disability. I'm fascinated by the history, the development of thought, ideas and the whole process of consciousness; how and what this leads us to create, to believe. For me art is diversity, opening any academic discipline, issue, material, subject, technology to exploration. Anything can be used to develop ideas and disrupt a patterning, society's and my own. The distinction between art and life is in constant flux; one blurred construct overlapping another, quivering in the process. My work is to challenge the very existence of the norm; challenge and so liberate the conforming and their limited and limiting understanding of life, politics and culture. Diverisity in body, mind and spirit doesn't restrict it advances. There is a universal need for people to do things differently in the future; to support what is undefined, as yet. People who were excluded demand to shape and reform the future. It's not about adding or fitting into existing identity debates and discourse because we are diversity, not a static set of understandings. We, as diversity, are constantly open to change in our layered, complex, subtle experience and awareness. We disrupt traditional and contemporary theories of difference and normality. To survive we must liberate those so bound by the definition of normal. outside-centre Email