About me

My former work as a performance artist

In 1980, while at art college, I began to look at, and to question, my own fragile identity as someone who was very definitely different, disabled, and therefore, without any relevant cultural reference points. There were disability reference points all right, but they had been created by non-disabled people and regarded disabled people as tragic, pathetic or brave. These images were so far removed from my own experience, I had to search for an image of disability I could be proud of, an image that did not reek of emotion or pity, an image that reflected disability as being a part of being human and all the richness and diversity that that entails.


In a single sentence, my issue-based work has always been about opposing cultural norms and making strong, and vibrant statements about my life and the lives of other disabled people, our commitments and our values.

Disability Arts is not, as some eccentric disabled people shutting ourselves off from the rest of society. Disability arts gives us the confidence and the opportunity to take our place in society authorised and empowered by the understanding that we do not need to discard our identity as the price of being accepted and included.


Issues of acceptance and inclusion were critical questions in my own life when I began exploring my own image as a disabled woman. I did so because on a very fundamental level I did not feel seen. I felt invisible in the world. I did not see my own whole image reflected anywhere. And I mean, anywhere. I saw bits of me - my face in the morning- my feet ankle deep in the washing-up at night, but all of me? - Never. I never felt seen in the world. I never felt that I received a response to my presence in the world that was clear and unambiguous. It always felt filtered through an 'ablest' perceptive. I was heroic, pathetic tragic or insane, at the very least, "different" "other".


Even among my own community of disabled people I felt that my experience was reflected through another perspective, this time a disablist perspective - I am one of those able disabled people - the non-wobbling, non-dribbling, well-educated types, -in short a "walkie-talkie".

In some ways it is relevant to what I am saying that until I was thirty years old I had never met anybody without arms who moved as I do, using their feet as I do. But really it is not so relevant because what I am talking about is something other than a bodily reflection. It is the clear and unambiguous statement from another person that one is seen and understood. Being seen and being understood is central to my work.


As with all of my previous work in this arena, the performance piece called "Stories of a Body" has its origins in issues that arise in my own life, and is firmly rooted in my experience as a disabled woman. It takes the form of a monologue that I delivered standing naked in front of my audience. This format was prompted by my initial visit to a G.P. Without much preamble or invitation, he launched into a speech about how thalidomide had been such an awful tragedy and how I must feel very angry towards him and the medical profession in general. Then he waited for me to ‘absolve’ him of all this guilt he was carrying and trying to dump on me. As an adult I was able to give back to him responsibility for his own feelings, and cleared with him how I wanted him to relate to me as my G.P. However, the incident shook me and reminded me forcefully of how I had been disempowered as a child, -how I had been stripped naked, objectified and desensitized by the medical profession as they labeled, categorised, defined and re-defined my very existence. I remember remembering it all, recording it in my child’s memory as if to act as a witness in my adulthood to the indignity I endured as a child. I remember the big words they used, I remember their recommendations when I was four years old, and how their artificial arms would fit me better if they sliced off my little hand. Most of all, I remember their horror at my condition. They treated me as if I were invisible and incapable of comprehending the judgments they were making about me and my future.



I would like to be able to show on this website, my last performance, but I can't. Not only are the sound appalling, and the picture less than perfect, but also a record of the performance misses out the essential ingredient, which makes this performance work. The essential ingredient of course is being there. Engaging Being Engaged. Gazing and Being Engazed. Mo White expresses this well in a review published in the arts review magazine, Circa. NO 72 (1995)
"What Mary Duffy does here, in what becomes a powerful strategy, is an act of circumvention by being at the same time the object of, and the active subject in constructing our gaze. Where her story tells of the gaze that is directed at her, the audience is forced to examine their own gaze, which reproduces exactly the same conditions of looking as she tells of. The space which can exist between the represented and the representational has been collapsed. My gaze, as a member of the audience, is returned and I am implicated in this process of looking. It has revealed something of myself in me. This is why this performance works. It does its own job, right before your eyes. "

©Mary Duffy, 1996