Neil Pemberton and Beck Heslop discuss their participation in Jo Longhurst’s installation, In Plain Sight? Commissioned by the SMS Belonging Project at the University of Manchester, the graffiti installation uses images of bindweed to provoke questions about disability, belonging, and exclusion.
Disabilities can and do exist ‘in plain sight’ while remaining unseen. These invisible disabilities often go unrecognised because they lack the visible markers we typically associate with impairment. People who appear ‘able-bodied’ may be coping with chronic pain, life-changing fatigue, or sensory sensitivities.
In universities, as elsewhere, people with invisible disabilities face a dilemma. Fail to correct the assumption that you are non-disabled and risk burning out in the attempt to keep pace with non-disabled peers. Conversely, disclose your disability and risk being accused of over-sharing or told “you don’t look disabled”. This disclosure becomes, as disability studies scholar Ellen Samuels describes, an ongoing, repetitive negotiation, because ‘visibility can fluctuate, vanish, reappear, or be wilfully misread’ (Samuels, 2014). An unending dilemma that recurs with each introduction. Meanwhile, imposter syndrome attacks from both sides: Am I disabled enough to deserve support? Do I belong within high-achieving ranks of the University?
This disconnect between appearance and embodied experiences is at the core of Jo Longhurst’s In Plain Sight? Commissioned by the University of Manchester’s School of Medical Sciences (SMS), it is a series of graffiti-styled stencils inspired by the plant bindweed and installed at three locations in the Stopford Building, which houses the University of Manchester’s Medical School. The artwork was installed in three phases over six weeks with volunteer support, guerrilla-style. In the final stage we added a QR code linking to resources and support networks for staff and students with unseen disabilities.
By posing the question of visibility through artistic intervention, Longhurst’s work challenges us to see beyond superficial cues, forcing us to recognise how disabled experiences are overlooked when they don’t fit conventional assumptions. This is especially true in Higher Education settings, where the norms of long hours, geographic mobility, and ceaseless productivity on precarious contracts presume the absence of disability (Dolmage, 2017; Price, 2011). The additional effort required to access Higher Education and keep up with its pace remains, like these disabilities, invisible.
Origins
In June 2024, the SMS Belonging Project commissioned Jo Longhurst to create bindweed artwork directly on the walls of Stopford. That March, she introduced her ongoing body of work Crip during a talk at the school’s International Women’s Day events. Crip uses the motif of bindweed to spotlight embodied experiences of invisible disabilities through film, photography and collage. (Slominski, 2023; Wilkinson, 2023).
According to Longhurst,
Each new crip work embraces the persistent anti-clockwise growth of bindweed (a marginalised, unloved plant) as a metaphor for crip living, proposing a rethinking of the social and ecological landscape, and suggesting a different way to understand care by highlighting the interconnectedness of social, cultural, and bio-diversity and the urgent need to create a more sustainable, equitable future. (Longhurst, n.d)
Crip resonated with staff members and postgraduate researchers living with invisible disabilities. During the panel, they shared their own stories of being seen as too demanding, having their experiences trivialised, and the exclusionary effects of precarity in higher education. Each also conveyed a sense of stubborn persistence in the face of ableism and disablism.
Several of us in SMS’s Belonging Project, who also live with invisible conditions, wanted more bindweed to continue these conversations. So we invited Longhurst to create graffiti for our buildings as part of a campaign to raise awareness of invisible disabilities and signpost support. After working intermittently for several months, she found the ideal site. Stopford Medical School: home to the next generation of medical professionals studying at Manchester.
Out of Place
In Weeds: The Story of Outlaw Plants, Richard Mabey (2011) poses the question: when does a plant become a weed? Mabey argues cultural factors—where we think plants belong—determine which species are deemed undesirable.
Bindweed has been both revered and reviled. In some eras, it was valued for its healing properties and spiritual significance; in others, it was condemned as a crop-choking menace and agricultural nuisance.
According to Mabey, a plant becomes a ‘weed’ only when it conflicts with human intentions (Mabey, 2011). Similarly, many disability scholars argue that it is misalignment with a world built on certain norms that renders someone ‘disabled’, not any of their intrinsic traits. Just as a plant growing in the ‘wrong’ place might be labelled a weed, disabled people often face environments that don’t align with their needs.
Pairing bindweed and disability as metaphors for ‘being out of place’ provides an imaginative way to rethink who belongs. Instead of regarding bindweed or disability as a scourge to be removed, we might consider what its persistence reveals about adaptation, survival, and how certain plants (and people) navigate environments which weren’t designed for them.
By inserting bindweed into spaces where it ‘shouldn’t’ be, the artwork highlights how disabled people, too, are often expected to justify their presence, adapt to hostile environments, and suppress their needs to fit in. Yet, like bindweed, they persist—thriving in the cracks, resisting erasure, and reshaping the landscape through their presence. In this way, the graffiti provides both a mirror and an intervention, inserting bindweed into spaces it would never naturally occupy to provoke questions about disability, belonging, and exclusion.
One site in the Stopford building, beneath a staircase opposite a neatly trimmed garden, highlights this contrast. (Fig.1-2) Bindweed, a plant that thrives in disturbed soil, would never be permitted to grow there. Positioned in a busy corridor, the artwork highlights how architectural and social structures dictate what is allowed to flourish.
Another site, harshly lit by artificial fluorescents, points to the disabling or enabling impact of design choices (Fig.3-4).For some, bright fluorescent lighting triggers migraines; for others, such as those with low vision, artificial light is essential in windowless corridors. Access needs are not universal. What improves access for one person may create barriers for another. Inclusivity, then, requires moving beyond one-size-fits-all solutions to embrace adaptable, flexible environments that recognise diverse ways of navigating the world.
The final installation site was chosen for its neglected, battered walls.(Fig.5-6) By juxtaposing bindweed’s unexpected vitality against these worn surfaces, the artwork reveals how even the most overlooked spaces might be transformed when we encourage what is typically unwelcome to take root.
Imagining real bindweed thriving in a garden requires rethinking the garden as a more diverse habitat. Likewise, creating truly inclusive institutions means reshaping workplaces, learning environments and public spaces to support a wider range of people to flourish.
Crip Time
Unlike many climbers, bindweed spirals counterclockwise in an ‘anti-normative’ growth pattern. The plant’s twist direction, whether clockwise or anticlockwise, can offer advantages, helping vines climb higher and faster. But for Longhurst’s bindweed’s counterclockwise spiral embodies a deeper defiance—a refusal of expected order.
Crip time, like bindweed, moves against the grain of normative structures. It reimagines time beyond rigid, linear schedules, embracing flexibility, pauses, and adjustments to accommodate the unpredictable rhythms of disabled bodies (Kafer, 2013).
The bindweed project was undertaken in crip time. For Neil, this was liberatory. ‘It forced me to work differently—to pause, to move at a different rhythm, to acknowledge that speed is not the only measure of progress. Undertaken on a weekend, there were no emails to check, no looming distractions, just a shared sense of purpose as we installed Jo’s art.’ Living with dyslexia means constantly negotiating words on a page, deadlines, and the lingering worry of making mistakes and being ‘found out.’ Here, Neil found a brief refuge ‘where images took centre stage, granting me relief from the ongoing pressure of words.’
For Beck, despite only helping to install the artwork for one half day, disruption to their routine was more difficult. ‘Head fuzzy, socially spent and physically exhausted, it took another two weeks for me to begin to feel normal again. Even writing this now, outside my designated “working” time, I feel the shortness of breath and brain fog setting in.’
Living in crip time often means valuing survival and self-care over traditional measures of output. Reflecting on chronic illness, writer Alice Hattrick, describes crip time as ‘more elastic; about survival rather than achievement.’ Crip time reframes rest, recovery, and waiting as integral rather than incidental, stretching life beyond the usual pace (Hattrick, 2021). Time with chronic illness resembles a spiral staircase, looping back on itself, moving in fits and starts, resisting imposed rhythms. Longhurst’s bindweed thus becomes an emblem of crip time’s quiet defiance, growing against the norm, twisting insistently in the ‘wrong’ direction, refusing to conform.
Concluding Remarks
In Plain Sight? highlights the tension of in/visibility that underlies unseen disabilities. Dominant social imagination understands disability through what is seen – a missing limb, a wheelchair, a white cane. Those without such signifiers are often met with doubt. Of course, visibility does not equate to ease, just as invisibility does not mean an absence of struggle. This piece does not diminish the challenges of those with more apparent disabilities, butbroadens the conversation, urging us to recognise that disability exists in many forms—seen and unseen.
By placing her art about crip realities in plain sight, Longhurst forces us to pay attention. An installation cannot fix the deeply engrained, systemic issues of ableism, or resolve the divide between visibility and invisibility. But by raising the question, we begin to see differently, allowing us to recognise experiences which were previously invisible.
About the authors
Beck Heslop is an ESRC-funded postgraduate researcher at the Centre of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, using material culture and critical disability studies to examine how blind pedestrians shaped mobility technologies over the twentieth century. They are also a Researcher Development (EDI) intern and member of the Belonging Project.
Neil Pemberton is a Wellcome Trust funded research fellow at the Centre of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, where he researches the history of lived experience of limb loss and prosthetic use and (dis)articulation of grief, loss, and trauma. He is also the co-director of EDI for the School for Medical Sciences.
The University of Manchester’s The Belonging Project 1.0, created and run by Katharine Dibb and Neil Pemberton, is a group of volunteers from across the School of Medical Sciences.
References
Dolmage, Jay. 2017.Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Hattrick, Alice. 2021. Ill Feelings. London: Fitzcarraldo Editions.
Kafer, Alison. 2013. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Longhurst, Jo. n.d. “Crip (2021–ongoing)” [project description]. Accessed April 2, 2025.
Jo Longhurst’s website (includes details on Crip series and In Plain Sight?).
Mabey, Richard. 2010. Weeds: The Story of Outlaw Plants. London: Profile Books.
Price, Margaret. 2011. Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Samuels, Ellen. 2003. “My Body, My Closet: Invisible Disability and the Limits of Coming-Out Discourse.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 9 (1–2): 233–55.
Slominski, Lisa. 2023. “On ‘Here, Now’.” Studio Voltaire, August 2023. (Exhibition text discussing Jo Longhurst’s Crip project)
Wilkinson, Ellen. 2023. “Jo Longhurst: ‘I like slow looking. I try to make work to slow people down.’” a-n News, November 30, 2023.
Wong, Alice, ed. 2020. Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century. New York: Vintage Books.
