Finding freedom in freewheeling

Sue Austin, Multimedia, Performance and Installation artist, visited Johnson Space Center on Dec. 4 to share her story with employees as part of JSC's SAIC/Safety & Mission Assurance Speaker Forum. The topic was “Transforming the World from a Wheelchair; Life Without Limits.” Austin’s  eloquent talk focused on several topics, including, rethinking and representing the "power"chair; "Dis"ability becoming a tool to inspire, excite and enrich; and wheelchairs in space, the final frontier.



Austin also had the opportunity to tour different parts of JSC, including the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory. NASA astronaut Doug Wheelock tweeted about meeting Austin in the image below.



Austin is the founder and artistic director of Freewheeling, an initiative aiming to further the genre of Disability Arts. The company and the idea in general was created with several goals in mind: new employment opportunities, new technologies, new mode of diving, new streams of income generation in the southwest, and new sponsors engaged in and supporting the arts and new audiences.

In 2012, she was asked to be a part of the Cultural Olympiad in Britain, a celebration of the arts leading up to the Olympic and Paralympic Games. The work she created for the event, "Creating the Spectacle!" is a groundbreaking series of live art and video works of an underwater wheelchair.
 
In her lecture at JSC, Austin emphasized how using a wheelchair, a power chair, has taken her on a journey to places she could never imagine. Austin first began using her power chair in 1996 to give her functional mobility in the world again. When she first started using the wheelchair, she felt like it was as if she had become invisible.

There are sometimes powerful negative preconceptions that people associate with a wheelchair. It was inconceivable to her at the time that there could be any positive aspects of using a wheelchair. In that moment, it became her mission to transform those misconceptions, which can greatly impact a person’s identity.

 “Many people understand disability to mean someone is broken, and I am on a mission to change those misconceptions,” Austin said.

She aims to celebrate the hidden strength and power in disability. To her, disability becomes a term of empowerment. She is able to create a new space and a new identity from viewing the world from a wheelchair.

It has enabled her with the power to surprise, the power to transform. The power chair has become an important tool to taking Austin to previously unexplored places. It changed the way she looks at and thinks about the world.

Austin spoke about first starting to use the wheelchair.

“It was a tremendous new freedom,” Austin said. “It was like having an enormous new toy. I could whiz around and feel the wind in my face again. Just being out on the street was exhilarating. But even though I had this newfound joy and freedom, people’s reaction completely changed towards me. It was as if they couldn’t see me anymore, as if an invisibility cloak had descended.

 “They seemed to see me in terms of their assumptions of what it must be like to be in a wheelchair. When I asked people their associations with the wheelchair, they used words like limitation, fear, pity and restriction. I realized I’d internalized these responses, and it had changed who I was on a core level. A part of me had become alienated from myself. I was seeing myself not from my perspective, but vividly and continuously from the perspective of other people’s responses to me. As a result, I knew I needed to make my own stories about this experience. I started making work that aimed to communicate something of the joy and freedom I felt when using a power chair to negotiate the world. I was working to transform these internalized responses and preconceptions that shaped my identity when I started using the wheelchair by creating unexpected images.”

So Austin began to make artwork with her wheelchair. She used her wheelchair to paint circles and designs on the ground, leaving traces of her joy and freedom.



Next, Austin had the ultimate idea to transform preconceptions about disability without words. She had trained as a scuba diver before she became disabled, and thought the perfect way to see the world from a different perspective was to find some way to dive in a wheelchair.

She began the organic process of creating the technology to dive in a wheelchair, using two dive-propulsion vehicles designed for disabled drives and a torpedo with a battery and motor on front to create an underwater wheelchair. She literally imagined the unimaginable and made it possible. Now she says the unimaginable is a wheelchair is space … but can you imagine?

The project has taken more than 10 years and required “building a little, testing a little and flying a little,” similar to how NASA technology is developed.

 “The chair becomes like an extension to my body,” Austin said. “It is way better than normal diving – like flying underwater because you are supported and have a motor. It has transformed my relationship with diving. Nobody can keep up with me in the wheelchair!”



Austin makes films to show her diving in her power chair, as seen in the video below. But she conveyed that 360-degree films only give a faint impression of what it is like. Even with six different cameras, the freedom she feels cannot be explained.



Austin’s films have triggered responses almost daily from people who are inspired by her and wonder, “How did you get to where you are?” Or, “If you can do that, I can do anything!”

She strives to be a positive role model and transform people’s preconceptions when they see a wheelchair.

“The wheelchair becomes a vehicle for transformation,” Austin said. “It has literally pushed me through into a new way of being, into new dimensions and into a new level of consciousness. ‘Creating the Spectacle’ is about creating new ways of seeing, being and knowing.”