Spoons (After Carolyn Lazard) - artwork
Item
Title
Spoons (After Carolyn Lazard) - artwork
Description
Work created by artist Jamila Prowse during an artist residency, for 'Full Stack Feminism in Digital Humanities', a project funded by the AHRC and the IRC, part of their ‘UK-Ireland Collaboration in the Digital Humanities Research Grants Call’ (grant numbers AH/W001667/1 and IRC/W001667/1).
Spoons (After Carolyn Lazard) is a moving-image work based upon Spoons Theory, which uses spoons as a visualisation of the disparity in energy reserves between disabled and abled people. Though disabled and abled persons will start the day with the same number of spoons, an abled person may only need one spoon to undertake an activity such as going to the shops, while a disabled person might use four spoons. In this way, disabled people deplete their spoons (or energy reserves) far quicker and thus have to be conscious about how they spend their spoons. Spoons Theory has translated into a colloquialism within crip communities – “I’m out of spoons,” or “I’m going to spend my spoons on you.”
Over a six-month period, Jamila exchanged voicenotes with three disabled artists – Leah Clements, Carolyn Lazard and Bella Milroy – about their personal relationships to Spoons Theory, which has then been turned into an original score using an algorithm by sound artist Felix Taylor, exploring thinking around voicenotes as a form of holding commune in crip communities, particularly for those who are bed-bound or housebound.
The work is made in reference to Carolyn Lazard’s 2018 moving image, Crip Time, and mirrors the same bird’s-eye view shot of a tablecloth.
Fittingly, while making the work, the artist was continually out of spoons.
Date
2023
Identifier
FSFM00026_O
Creator
Jamila Prowse
Publisher
Full Stack Feminism in Digital Humanities
Subject
Art
contemporary art
film
screen art