As part of our In Practice series, Kate Marks and Tracey Falcon collaborate on a polyvocal creative text, interwoven with artwork, which explores Tracey’s lived experience of spinal cord injury and movement within the human and non-human environment.
This is a collaboration between two people. One (A) who, in the context of this conversation, brings her experience as an older White, disabled mother, artist and creative life coach; and one (B) who is a queer, female, able-bodied White academic, employed on a project called Moving Social Work at Durham University. The authors met as co-production partners for the Moving Social Work project. Both are interested in exploring the changing features of identity in relation to place and time, creative expression, and movement in nature.
The wooden kitchen table solidly holds the room. Two women gather there, joining the lineage of women who have claimed the kitchen table as a place to create, collaborate, deconstruct, resist. Strewn across the table are the artist’s photographs, collages, and collected treasures from dog walks. These materials lead the women gently into the world of movement, nature, and outdoors. Sinking into the art, the women meet in a woodland, moving differently but together. One, the artist, plans ahead – determined, curious, assessing the ground surface. The other, the researcher, moves with fewer calculations, for her movement always has meant adhering to convention, to winning, to success. As they talk, the researcher’s assumptions about what movement means fall away.
This article grows through interruptions, excitement, hesitations and backtracking. Conversation is the method, messily choreographed through trust, consent, and attention to power. It resists a single account. Meaning is found through relation to the perspectives of each other, rather than in finding agreement. These perspectives jostle attempts to ‘frame the conversation’ versus more ‘creative exploration’. The artist’s collages act as co-producers, shaping how we talk, think, and feel.
Our journey through the woodland is not neutral. Tree roots rise, interrupting, or barring access. The narrow, uneven path is shaped by who we are: disability, gender, class, age, sexuality, race, history. Our access to worlds beyond this kitchen table is infused with these changing identities, and heavy histories of being corrected, excluded, patronised; of what counts as movement in the judging eyes of the world. Grounding for one, precarious for the other.
The Unlocked Series
A: I used to feel part of the forest. We were kin, we were one. Now parts of me are so scattered amongst the trees that I can’t gather myself to move through the undergrowth. I don’t know who I am in the forest anymore.
B: For me, it’s the loamy smell of the soil, like a child with hands in the dirt, connected. School playing fields, the garden, a sense of enduring familiarity. The woodland beckons me to move without hesitation, without fear of censorship. No one is telling me that my movements aren’t right for the space.
A: I used to feel this way too.
A: It is so easy to NOT DO. The easiest thing is to sink into my bodily responses and not move, not rattle the pain throughout. Just float on the waves of cloud jetted up by the numbing potions pulsing through my veins. There are so many layers to consider now. Why make the supreme effort required to push through? Veins through the pink like branches through petal. Pain like ink held, inescapable, in bodies of air. So much easier to lock down. To not do. To become victim to the body bounding the desires forming pictures in my mind.
B: A shift in time, a shift in mind, a forced shift? How do you become unlocked?
A: That word victim doesn’t sit well with me. The desires grow. The toadstool drugs morph as I learn to see through the fog, unshackling the spiney snakes just enough. It may look different, I may feel different, but the world beckons.
Different parts of me are arrested in different places. What’s my crime? The layers involve fight. Everything feels like fight once I come out of freeze. The key to becoming unlocked glows with resistance. Nothing is clear. ‘How to’ is a puzzle. (It’s a) Knockout, the Krypton Factor with Crosswords. Cross= Multiply. Worship. Kiss. Wrong. Add. Crossroads. Move across. Angry.
B: Where can we find the pieces of the puzzle? Do we find the corners first, keep working until we master the central core, or do we start with the top, blue sky thinking?
A: The pieces are all there but they’re different shapes now.
A: A super, eldest son, crowd-funding effort with unpayable-back generosity, charitied me an off-road chariot. I could reconnect with the trees. FREEDOM, CHAINS in equal parts. I wept when I first re-entered the leafy rooms where I had felt so at home. It was good to be back and greet, once more, those barky friends I thought I had lost forever. Over here, over here and over there.
B: I breathe the same barky friends which tower like skyscrapers above my head. I feel connected, that same sense of home amongst friends.
A: I wept for those friends that I could no longer reach, as their xylem and phloem heart pumped with mine in the denser parts of the forest and my memory. I knew we were connected beneath. Through that mycelial circuitry connecting all and bubbling up with psychedelic blooms helloing at their cousins pumping through my bloodstream in thrice daily doses. My connection is infinite.
B: There is something else. A sense of dichotomy, disorientated, juxtaposition of comfort and concern. My body moves freely, with looseness and ease, it is within my mind the barriers are thrown up.
A: The soft petals I love with my new eyes are barriered with pain. Legs tangling with the brambles and knotting the way for the crawling spines, unsafe and unconsidered. Ever watched by the wheelchair wheel eyes spying and reminding. Still, I need to breathe the trees.
B:I feel calm but an ever-present tickling sensation on the back of my neck urges me to run, run faster. The eyes watching me are different yet the same. They stare at me too. The roots of mycelial circuitry wrap around me. I hold my hands in tight fists. Was that someone emerging from the undergrowth? HOLD YOUR NERVE. Run. But don’t let them see you’re running from them. Smile in case they are looking.
B: Smile. Smile. Smile. Keep that up. The voices echo:
“It’s all about having fun, not being perfect”,
“I’m so glad you’re enjoying yourself”
“It’s not about being the fastest”
“Just have a go”
“Impossible is not a fact”
These voices ingrain themselves. Is there really scope to not be perfect, is there scope to move in ways they aren’t expecting? I feel duty-bound to comply to their unvoiced requests. I can’t just be good; I must be great. I can’t just take part; I need to win. But what if I could reconnect with other ways of being and of moving. Feel the connection to the woodland AND the smile on my face.
A: The bud blossom fruit and rest pattern of the forest now hits me daily rather than stretched over a year. I am warped in time and also in the physical space I occupy, the physical spaces I enter and the physical space that I am. Space time warp. I have truly entered a new realm. From being tall and seeing at height I have shrunk to crotch level. The child straining to see through legs. The oak versus the shrub. Trying to keep up with the adults who, as you look up, are busy making decisions about you without even making eye contact. Afraid of your thorns. The opposite of the out of body experience. The chair represents the dual existence of being ignored, detached from the main event, whilst hypervisibility feels like a neon arrow pointing at you. Damn those bright berries.
The view from my wheelchair has literally given me new eyes on the world. Sorry, sorry, excuse me. Sorry. Could I just… sorry. With that apologetic smile on my face as they sing song their smiley replies of aren’t you clever/brave, who’s looking after you? And sometimes… that… word… that… makes… me… want… to… lash… out. ‘BLESS’. Just smile. Quip back about your inabilities. If you own the joke it can’t hurt you, can it? London plane trees shed their bark when they have accumulated too much pollution.
Surrounded by woodland, also strewn across my kitchen table, where I look relatively normal, the borrowed finds being stroked and held, welcomed throughout my house, garden and into my art making. Chatting about this and that and not about my needs.
One of us selects a bark fragment from the tabletop. The other scatters the pile of collage images. We leave the woodland without resolution. We make another cup of tea. The ground is still uneven.
B: Unlocked doesn’t mean arrival at a destination. It names a momentary loosening of expectation, of certainty, of the demand to move in ways that are deemed suitable by society.
A: For me it means a slow unfolding. Unfreezing. Tentatively feeling my way through what might still be possible and what might be new.
Our conversation remains unfinished. The woodland continues to present a different opportunity and challenge each time we enter it. This collaborative work stays open, attentive to change, and committed to intersectional, relational practice.
About the authors
Tracey Falcon has been an artist educator working in art galleries, museums, and even in a forest, as well as teaching at universities. She has undertaken many community projects with vulnerable groups. After a spinal injury in 2018 she had to rethink her career path. Drawing on her lived experience as a disabled single parent, and her creative project work in helping people gain confidence and problem-solve, she retrained in counselling and life coaching. She has a passion for nature, in particular trees, and continues to make art. Curiosity and connection are the values she most treasures.
Kate Marks is a critical scholar in sport and physical activity at the University of Durham. Grounded in intersectional feminist theory and critical disability studies, she examines the structural inequities shaping participation, inclusion, and wellbeing. Using co-production, community-engaged research, and narrative approaches, she leads interdisciplinary projects that centre lived experience. Outside of research, Kate enjoys trail running and walking her dog in the outdoors, drawing inspiration from movement and nature. She can be found on LinkedIn.
About In Practice
‘In Practice’, The Polyphony’s creative practice research project, showcases multi-modal creative engagement with the lived experience of chronic illness, disability, caregiving and health from a range of creative practitioners within and beyond academic research. Founded by Aly Fixter and Grace Brimacombe-Rand, they wanted to bring their own creative practice and academic engagement with creative texts to the medical humanities digital community and foster new connections. If you are a creative person who explores their lived experience of health or the body through writing, art, photography or any creative methods, please get in touch to share your work with The Polyphony’s audience.
