Ed Beerbohm

Fairly late on in my life, I was afflicted with a neurological condition which slowly but surely eroded my ability to move about. Walking - previously an automatic function that I didn't really think about - became perplexing, exhausting and painful.

❝And so with disability and immobility I became increasingly confined to my flat and increasingly isolated.

Art also came to me late in life and it has proved to be a means by which I can escape the tyranny of isolation.

Disability reconfigures space: For me, walls, doors and stairs have become more barrier-like, more excluding and distances have stretched out while the fabric of everyday life and my navigation of it has become more complex and challenging.

❝But painting and film-making have helped me adapt to this spatial reconfiguration, providing a means of escape more literal than a flight of fancy.

By painting the walls, I can transform them from barriers to the outside world into alternative vistas.

In film my bathroom can become, rather than a site of mundane ablutions, instead a place where fish might chat to one another.

It's a continual process - there's no fixed goal. Instead, by continually altering the interior of my home, I find myself negotiating and renegotiating my relationship with space.

❝It's not a solution or panacea, but the dominant language in which I search for one.