Mob-Shop artist in residence
Mary Slattery
Artist Mary Slattery was commissioned as Mob-Shop Artist In Residence. Mary is a writer, artist, advocate, sewist, & organiser; radical politics and disability justice are essential components of her practice. She used this time to carry out her continued exploration of collectivist tools and resource sharing within this particular context of mobility aids, researching the disabled practices crucial for survival.
Mary speaks about her work for Mob-Shop;
I am contributing to Mobshop from a slightly different perspective than my original brief, due to being unable to attend mobility shops in-person.
I also felt excited to talk about how my radical political relationship with my disability informs my approach to mobility aids.
I utilise Instagram as a tool to share information across the globe about mobility aids and adaptations that disabled people either may not have heard of, or may need help with.
From this perspective we see almost everything that has ever been invented as a mobility aid of some kind or another, and every human being as having 'access needs’.
I work voluntarily 7 days a week on these 2 sister projects, Adaptive Meals and Adaptive Hacks. They generally take the form of people either submitting a request for wisdom from the community or an offer of an idea or tool that the respondent has discovered or modified to suit the need.
I feel like I cannot separate my liberation as a sick disabled person from that of every other oppressed human on earth. As such, I believe in a fundamental sharing of ideas in a free and accessible way, including intellectual property, which is reflected in the spaces that I moderate. I insist on a culture of sharing everything, and I encourage people to share what they have available to them with others who do not have such access to resources. Part of the Disabled Meals project was running a financial mutual aid project to buy people equipment to enable them to cook, eat and drink more frequently and safely.
I loved running the financial mutual aid project and people with very little money gave generously to ensure that their fellow crips could safely access eating, drinking and cooking. Unfortunately that part of the project came to a close around September 2021 due to PayPal closing its pools fundraising function.
The greatest joy of these kinds of adaptive concepts projects has been the natural by-product of de-stigmatisation for disabled people. I have been inundated with messages from people who had previously felt so ashamed of the way that they accessed nutrition and hydration, many of whom suddenly felt like they were clever inventors, rather than deviants living in the shadows of our unhealthy ableist food culture.
Click the links below to find out more about these projects