careworn & coil undertakes the ongoing photographic and written documentation of my disabled body through invisible physical and mental illness. The project aims to showcase the daily negotiations that occur within myself, replicating the complexities and comfort of living as a spoonie. I work to challenge notions of able-bodied productivity, using photographs and sculptural installation to task viewers with challenging their perceptions of the human experience, creating an environment that emphasizes the emotional vulnerability of placing private life into the public sphere. careworn & coil breathes the concept of "Crip Time", a term coined by academic Alison Kafer – disabled people’s relationship to time rather than monoculture’s ideas productivity in a given day – and bell hooks’ “Oppositional Gaze” – allowing Black bodies the right to “looking”. The project asks viewers to interrogate their perceptions of invisible illness and how it manifests in the body. Within the images, light and shadows act as a catalyst for both these theoretical concepts and how they specifically interact with my navigation of fatness, depression and chronic pain.


The project applies research-creation as a means of situating itself within the broader conversation of disability theory; notably from a Black Feminist disability politic that is oftentimes understudied. Incorporating the works of racialized disabled scholars such as Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Mia Mingus and Alice Wong allows me to take hold of my personhood while rejecting palatability. Ultimately, in staking myself on these terms, I allow for an active viewership that challenges ableism and supposedly “correct” ways of being consumed.

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by Sarah-Tai Black

“We must leave evidence. Evidence that we were here, that we existed, that we survived and loved and ached. Evidence of the wholeness we never felt and the immense sense of fullness we gave to each other. Evidence of who we were, who we thought we were, who we never should have been. Evidence for each other that there are other ways to live — past survival; past isolation.”

— Mia Mingus

There is something divine that happens when we are able to commune together to give testimony and bear witness to our realities as Black crip folks. It isn’t simply the neoliberal machinations of representation or a reductive identity politics at work, but a form of access intimacy given further specificity (that is, care) through the experience of living as disabled and chronically ill people in an anti-Black world.

It is a form of Black crip kinship that recognizes the ways in which Black lives are expected to endure the expectation of supposed futurelessness; the ways that our current world’s privileging of able-bodied experience precludes access to space, relations, and supports, in turn, further compounding this deathbound assumption of Black life, rather than wholly reorienting it (as it often does for non-Black crip folks).

But we know this. It is in the safety of care for the context of our daily lives — offered without being bound to the labour of legibility — that this space of kinship, whether that be literal space, virtual space, or otherwise, can be cultivated and stewarded. Even if sometimes all too fleeting, this feeling of communion with other Black crip bodyminds expands the bounds of our current space and time to encompass multiple worlds and, hopefully, future models of possibility.

Here, access needs (and desires) are no longer an accommodation but an understood necessity; disability is no longer invisibilized or made to answer to the white supremacist call to undoubtedly name oneself and present a meticulously documented archive of diagnosis and condition as so-called proof; being in relation to one another no longers comes with the demand to centers ableist comforts, but considered effort to collectively safeguard and offer our bodies and minds to be just as they need to be in that moment.

For many of us, spaces like the ones offered by the work of Careworn & Coil are few and far in between, offering a buoy upon which we are offered rest and refuge alongside those who have experienced and been oriented in the world likewise. They are an invitation to name and welcome our vulnerabilities with grace, to share the often enigmatic nature of what our bodies know and how they come to know it, to release the expectation of not just action or productivity, but the emotional labour of performing being “well” (or perhaps, more truthfully, just “okay”) as a form of survival in a world structured by, not just ableism, but anti-Black respectability politics.

Here, the act of looking is one that relocates our experiences — so often these aspects of Black crip life we know for certain but are continuously asked to deny or neglect — from the made-private to the public. This defiant looking radically bends time — cripping time — protracting it into a more fully prismatic expression of our experience as it is often reshaped and reformed by our bodyminds in what feels like a multiplicity of moments at once.

It’s an act of recognition that opposes our current world’s violent desire to not only negate our individual and collective experiences, but also to disavow us, structurally and spiritually, of our interdependence. It is a sterling reminder that we are able to find life sustaining kinship in such acts of seeing and being seen, in all ways and by all means. As our Black crip ancestors did, as we do, as our futures must: we exist together, past survival, past isolation.

Christina Oyawale (b. 2000 Toronto; lives and works in Toronto and Winnipeg) is a self-proclaimed “anarchist punk boy” and emerging multi-hyphenate artist, graphic designer, researcher + curator. Working with film, photography and text, they use memories, shared Black feminist history and knowledge exchange in order to create work that emphasises curiosity of learning and documenting the necessity of slowness. Currently they are attempting to break free from the expected/frequent uses of identity politics under our current neo-liberalist society, that requires marginalized people to sell their identity in exchange for “visibility” in the art world and academia.

Their work and research attempts to foster communal conversation surrounding capitalism, anti-Black racism, queer-/trans-phobia and ableism. Many of these socio-political conditions that they believe we should be fighting to dismantle. Their current research interests and musings surround: Social Reproduction Theory, the works of Angela Davis, Naomi Klein and Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, queer USSR and Black feminist disability theory. 


Sarah-Tai Black (they/them) is an arts worker, curator, and critic born and (mostly) raised in Treaty 13 Territory/Toronto whose work aims to center Black, queer, trans, and crip futurities and freedom work. Their curatorial work has been staged at Cambridge Art Galleries (Cambridge, ON), Dunlop Art Gallery (Regina, SK), MOCA (Toronto ON), PAVED Arts (Saskatoon, SK), and A Space Gallery (Toronto, ON) and they have worked in public arts spaces such as Art Museum at the University of Toronto, McMaster Museum of Art, and as Interim Artistic Director of Paved Arts.

Crip - a word reclaimed by the disabled community that can be used as a noun, adjective, or verb to refer to disabled people; see also, crip theory.

Bodymind - a term used in disability and feminist studies to describe the idea that the body and mind are interdependent and cannot be separated.

Spoons/Spoonie - Spoon theory is a metaphor describing the amount of physical or mental energy that a person has available for daily activities and tasks, and how it can become limited. The term was coined in a 2003 essay by American writer Christine Miserandino. Those with chronic illness or pain have reported feelings of difference and alienation from people without disabilities. This theory and the claiming of the term spoonie is utilized to build communities for those with chronic illness that can support each other.

中文翻譯 (Chinese Translation)