Coral Vision

I was the only person I knew who was making life-changing decisions at sixteen years old, decisions that would impact my health and life moving forward, forever. My surgeon told me that he could not recover vision in my left eye, and that if it was painful and if I wished, I could have it replaced. With what? I wasn’t sure at the time, but at sixteen I was very aware that my eyes did not match. My left “bad” eye was sunken back in my head, small, and looked hurt. I met the surgeon who was to take out my eye and replace it with what I now understood to be coral from the sea. “From where??/ How? Where does MY eye go?” My questions remain unanswered to this day more than fifteen years later.

As a young person, my time at high school was periodically disrupted by invasive eye surgeries. It was normal for me to miss two weeks of school to lay face down to try to save the vision that was deteriorating due to a degenerative eye condition that was extremely rare. My doctors did not know if I would lose all of my vision or what would happen in my future; we were trying to problem-solve on the fly. These disruptions remind me of the Disability dramaturgical practices of valuing, inviting, and celebrating disruptions in all aspects of the art and process.

In theatre work and what I do now, Disability dramaturgy means carving a specific path to care informed by the iterative environments and capacities of our world and our selves. It considers the composition of an event or piece of art and identifies and advocates for Disability-related shifts that benefit both the organizers/creators and the people who experience the piece. It doesn’t matter if it’s disruptive, if it anchors us to care and support then it is in line with Disability politics. Sometimes there is not a clear path to meaningful care, but there is an intentional moving through of discomfort to acknowledge the complexity of being in relationship with one another.

Thinking back over the aftermath of replacing my real eye with coral, the pain, the bright orange eye replacement that now sits inside of my head, disrupts my idea of what it means to be human at all. Can someone still be human if they’ve given part of their human body away? The coral that now lives in my head has no possibility of developing vision for me or it, but what I know for sure is that it keeps the shape of an eye and moves, somehow beautifully and intricately embedded into my blood supply and other vascular organs that have welcomed the foreign piece of the sea into my biological environment. This is its own dramaturgy.

The coral isn’t perfect; it keeps breaking and hurting parts of my actual body, it is hostile, it is not smoothly transitioning into its new, human environment. Is the sea meant to sit interdependently with a human body? What does my blood supply provide that coral did not get under the salt water? Does it know where it is? Does it know anything at all?

Now I’m not sure who I even am without the bright orange, rough-to-the-touch coral nestled into my eye cavity and behind the brightly and beautifully painted prosthetic eye that covers it every day. Who am I with it? What has this coral even offered me, and why have I not thought about this before?

I woke up and everything was half. I felt half empty, half-full of energy, half-hungry, half-motivated to get up. And I opened my eyes, and they were half too. The right side of my room was glowing, gorgeous with summer sunlight but on the right… a milky, dark, severe, nothing. Looking down at my hands, there was half-a-lifeline, my thumb and front fingers were bare, staring back at me with a cold accusation and the rest was… gone. Disappeared. It didn’t matter how hard I rubbed, I washed them out with soap, I used tweezers to pull Q-tips to push, but nothing changed. Half of the world was gone. Overnight my sight escaped me, whispered its goodbyes in the twilight and snuck out the back door, leaving me with only half. Who gave it permission to slip away on me? I need it, I need it to… see, to make coffee to talk to drive, it never asked if I was okay with this, we didn’t negotiate on the terms over a cup of tea, it just got up and left me. (pause) At least half of it stayed, the little eye that could, remained.

He looked at me and asked “but why, why the coral? What does the coral do that makes it good to be an eye replacement?” and I didn’t know. At sixteen, I had just trusted the doctors, my parents, myself, that this was the right path forward, but I wasn’t really thinking about the why, I was just focused on the getting through it all, the massive changes in my life.

So he looked it up for me and came back the next day and said “it’s because of their ability to blend into the blood supply, it embeds itself, it survives off of you.” I am in an exchange, apparently, with this coral. I read a lot about coral around the world dying; am I offering this piece of coral a thriving environment to live? Does it know it’s not in the sea? If it’s using my blood supply to vascularize and move the muscles around my eye, is it really alive?

Practicing art while in good relationship to Disability requires an honouring of our own needs. When I am supporting artists I toggle the line between support and person. When we create art, sometimes we forget ourselves, our needs, and we compromise (rest, for example, is big for me). What might create access for one person could also disable another, and so identifying and understanding the conflicts, frictions, and intersections between our experiences allows the art we work on to reflect the needs we bring to it. I want to make a beautiful something no matter what it takes. When it comes to being in good relationship to Disabled artists and people that you work with, what it takes is not compromising our needs to make the piece beautiful.

Disability dramaturgy fosters care for and by Disabled people where that care is present onstage, backstage, and in the audience. Dramaturgy here refers not only to the content and narrative of the story, but also how care is working in the space to support the work and how care might need to be shifted based on the specific intersectional needs of those present. Access and care ultimately blend into the artistic aesthetic of a piece.

At least there’s that, we still share the same ocean, the same water.
I use my hands.
I recognize every piece of my garden with my fingers, the ocean floor is cool and quiet, and the leaves of my plants float around me, Francine, Bernice, Francesca, Madam Burgundy. My aunties named these flowers based on old names they’d heard of, I can name each one with one swoosh of my finger. Madam Burgundy, for example, has a long, flat leafy base with rough craters. 

I feel restless but also rooted, you know?
My aunties warned that if I didn’t move, if I didn’t pry myself up from this ocean floor that my back would eventually fuse, they’d seen it before, sisters resting for eternity tangled with the sand and coral and plant life. They… became the ocean. They are around us now.

My art practice is tactile, which invites anyone to touch my pieces and ultimately interact with the art to build a relationship with it, to develop meaning through touch. As a Blind woman, touch is an important part of how I understand everything: through my hands. In 2023, I am aware of human impact on the earth, humanity’s desire to touch and know our world, but what is the cost? There’s an Instagram account depicting natural wonders of our world being destroyed by tourism, by people travelling to beautiful places “for the ‘gram,” to get a picture, to gain cultural clout for “being there,” without thinking about the colonial, extractive touch that this kind of travel has on the wonders being visited. I am aware that visiting the coral reefs contributes to their sickness, their disappearance, their erasure. I want to create art with sustainability in mind, with impact on the environment in mind, with accessibility in mind, and with the desire to invite people into thinking differently about parts of our worlds and lives that we sometimes take for granted.

I dream of walking into an installation inside of a gallery or performing space, and the soft sound of underwater envelops me. The light is blue and dark. The air is warm, and I reach out my hand to feel a soft rug hanging from the wall, running along the walls of the entire room. The rug is intricate, it stretches from the walls to the floor, and my shoes step on a seabed made of upcycled yarn and found materials. Touching this coral will not hurt it, but continue to develop a relationship between me, the art, the real coral under the real sea, and ultimately the coral that’s using my blood supply in my head.

This piece doesn’t need to look or feel like the real coral underwater, but can and will be the manifestation of what I think it would feel and look like, woven and hooked and displayed so others can develop a relationship with frictions—but softly.

As an experiential, immersive, and accessible piece of art, I am inspired by other Disabled artists: Syrus Marcus Ware’s Antarctica (2019), Brian Solomon and Justin Many Fingers’s What’s Left Of Us (2017), and The Critical Design Lab/Tangled Art + Disability exhibition #CripRitual (2022), for example. I believe that working toward and moving with intention is the right way forward to continue to create work that is vibrant and honours Disability.

Coral Vision is a growing work-in-progress that endeavours to incorporate the principles of both Disability dramaturgy and, more broadly, of being in good relationship with Disability through its creation. Having an interactive, tactile performance piece inside the frame of an artistic installation invites in and values multiple ways to engage, understand, touch, and receive this piece of art; and validates that art, life, Disability, and how those themes interact with the larger world around us (climate crisis in this case) are all entangled, and require care and softness to unravel, or begin to unravel.

It’s harder for us to breathe, it’s hard for us to move…
Auntie said something above is burning,
Somewhere, a place,
I’m not sure what burning is.

(beat)

Reach out your arm, feel the air touching your skin
how does that feeling change as you move your arm fast
Or slow
How would that change if you were underwater?
welcome, you’re on the ocean floor, you can magically breathe, and you begin to move your arms…