Attitude TV focuses on value of art

28 June 2010
The value of art for people with experience of disability will be explored in a documentary being filmed for Attitude Television.

Researcher and reporter Tanya Black says the programme will examine the topic from several angles, including the way art can help open doors to a community for disabled people; the therapeutic qualities of the arts; and the value of art as a form of communication.
 
Artists featured in the documentary include New Zealand painters Kamini Nair, Andrew Blythe and Abby Twiss, and two young men from the Creative Growth Art Center programme for disabled artists in California.
 
For Kamini Nair, who has been attending Hamilton’s Sandz Gallery for more than ten years, having her work accepted for exhibition in a mainstream gallery gave her greater access to the community, Tanya says.
 
“In turn, the community saw Kamini in a new light. She gained credibility. It gave her the confidence to get up and speak at the opening.”
 
Tanya says she grappled with the theme of art as therapy.
 
“There is a therapy element for mental health consumers. It can be a way of steadying the mind and focusing; it can be an escape. Andrew Blythe, for example, said painting was a way of keeping his taniwhas and demons at bay.
 
“We’ve tried to keep away from the idea of people seeing art for disabled people as simply a way to pass time. It is more than that. With the art, there is always a creative process happening, which has a lot of value.”  

Overcoming language barriers

Deaf painter Abby Twiss provides an example of how art can help overcome language barriers.
 
“As the daughter of sculptor Greer Twiss, Abby was brought up surrounded by art,” Tanya says. “The value to her has been the ability to express herself across the language barrier. People might not be able to understand sign language, and written words cannot convey her emotions in the way a painting can.”
 
The director of the documentary, Emma Calveley, met two American artists while in San Francisco on another assignment. One is Daniel Miller, an autistic artist whose drawings have become part of the permanent collection at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The other young man, William Scott, has created “a kind of manifesto for a completely new San Francisco where they recycle all the bad people. He has lots of maps and paintings of the wholesome people populating the new city – complex ideas he might not have been able to communicate to people without the artwork.”
 
Filming is scheduled to finish in mid-July and Tanya expects the documentary to screen on Attitude TV some time in August.