Exploring disability - from a social model perspective - through the utilisation of public signs. Symbols are crystalline indicators that proliferate and make visible an Environment with Attitude. Identify the literal and symbolic; static and audio; stable and transient signs and forms that socially identify and construct disability as Otherness. Part of the process is recognising that such omnipresent signs litter the environment, and that they are symbols that define the permitted spaces and places of difference, and impairment. The sign of Otherness for disabled people exist all around us: toilets; parking spaces; entrances; passageways; hearing and visual impairments; Braille; et cetera, et cetera

  This image uses a number of images. The signs used are from a range of place and spaces that give an indication of the nature of the symbol of disability. The image has sharp edges and disjointed elements in order to emphasise the way in which certain signs, for certain people, are sharper, more visible and 'constructed' to identify us as an homogeneous abject other.

  The specific inclusion of the male/female sign is used to juxtapose the way in which the disabled, as identified in a number of disparate signs are made 'alien'. The disabling sign, as opposed to the sign of the disabled, creates a hegemony of normality in the negation diversity of experience not only within all section of the community but, more specifically, within the disabled community. The unity of identity and experience for disabled people that the signs falsely propagate is one of pathological uniformity rather than social objectification and exclusion.

  The 'alien' nature of the sign - it has no gender (let alone sex), no clothes, no difference, no context other than alien bodily functions, and no additional dimensions of life - is like the figure of Christ: iconoclastic. Iconoclastic in the sense that it is both pure (revealing of nothing other than its archetypal meaning to its disciples) and tainted (a reminder of the oppressive nature of a certain hegemonic structure that tyrannises any divergence from an accepted norm).

  The image is about revealing the hidden behind the visible. Revealing the real over the false iconography. Revealing the way in which a fairly rigid design(s), defines a social experience as a rigid collective bodily identity to mystify the illusory nature of normality as somehow valid over the deemed to be invalid inferiority of the disabled.

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