I studied the youtube video Christine Sun Kim: Friends and Strangers. The video explores Sun Kim as an artist who was born profoundly deaf, her career trajectory and the impact her experiences as a deaf person, an artist, a parent and an American living in Berlin has had upon her creative output. Sun Kim was born in California and moved to New York.
Initially I misunderstood the blog task as an attempt to find the individual’s positionality and wrote “I am hesitant that the need to find someone’s positionality can actually lead to assumptions about a person and their situation. I question whether this idea of positionality is actually of use or whether it becomes more detrimental, labelling and boxing off people into neat little compartments where assumptions about their needs are made.”
After the blog tutorial I reframed the analysis of Christine Sun Kim. The difficulty I had with this was that little is directly stated regarding Sun Kim’s identities, and I gained little from my further research which led me to make assumptions about her class, gender, etc.
Sun Kim discusses her intersectionality as an artist and deaf person and how this has excluded her from partaking in art classes during her high school and university education. When growing up she had an interest in art but didn’t take classes as there were no interpreters available. During both high school and university she was ‘told no’ when requesting to attend a sculpture class and evening class. There was no reason given in the video as to why they would prohibit her from attending the classes, the implication being that she is deaf and they refused to find a way to cater to her hearing differences.
Another aspect of Christine Sun Kim’s experience as an artist which was impacted by her deafness is her creative output. “A perk of being a member of the deaf community is that you have this shared culture, this shared language, and so people like to stay here (7:42) stuck in that echo but then I became an artist and had to go into the hearing world”. Sun Kim expresses jealousy of “artists who have the privilege to be misunderstood” and that her creative process and output reflects her constant need to be understood and explain, due to her deafness. Sun Kim doesn’t so much reject ambiguity in her art but clings to the need to be heard and seen, captioning buildings in Manchester, creating pie charts , drawing signs which create poetry and repetition which reflect her experience as a deaf person and the ‘echoing’ of her thoughts through an interpreter.
In the context of teaching garment construction, we are not made aware of disabilities until the student raises their needs due to GDPR/lack of communication from management. Due to this I generally try to cater as much as possible to a range of needs by providing verbal, written and visual communication techniques and videos which include captions. In terms of captions, I need to look at how these are used and whether they have a bias towards the hearing community, for example “when inserting the bobbin into the machine, you should hear a click”. In terms of accessibility to studio space for wheelchair users, I have big concerns over how this could be catered to due to the lack of space and cramped set up of the studios.
I participated in a knowledge exchange with a colleague over the summer. My colleague has limb differences and was learning to sew again. I researched adaptable sewing techniques online and reached out to an acquaintance who has limb differences about their advice, as they advocate for differently abled people to learn to sew and take up space within the industry. I found that using the knee pedal to lift the machine foot is more practical as it means your hand is available to guide fabric. I lowered the sewing speed, used a magnetic seam guide for the fabric to butt against so that it could easily be guided with one hand. We used pattern weights rather than pins to help place pattern pieces and cut fabric with a rotary blade rather than scissors. I also found scissors with a pinching action which were easier to use than traditional scissors, which were quite strenuous.
Through listening to my colleague and their needs, careful planning and research, I was able to successfully teach my colleague how to sew a pair of shorts through adaptable sewing techniques. This was a really positive experience for myself and my colleague and I learnt to consider further how I can adapt my practice to meet differently abled students’ needs.