The Many Costs of Living

About the

is“thisartisticcampaign unexpecteddesignedtogenerate communication,momentsofsolidarity,andperhaps,even,alittlerelief.”

We are living through a sustained period of crisis, but this intense difficulty and danger is not evenly felt. Disabled people are disproportionately impacted by the rising costs of living, with greater portions of income used on necessary expenses like energy bills, medication, and transport. The daily costs of living for disabled people are one of the most significant barriers they face. In a time of spiralling inflation, the chaos of a crumbling welfare state and national infrastructure, and set against a backdrop of climate breakdown, this has turned into an ongoing crisis. The Many Costs of Living is a collective response to this ongoing emergency.

Making use of alternative, public platforms for exhibition, this artistic campaign is designed, through medium and message, to generate unexpected moments of communication, solidarity, and perhaps, even, a little relief.

The Many Costs of Living picks up threads of conversation started by 2022’s Adam Reynolds Award winner, Jay Price, and their major artwork unveiled last year: The Mine. Through an interactive and evolving virtual narrative,

Jay’s work makes reference to the role of mass dissemination (wide and popular distribution) and technologies like the Printing Press in the defiance and survival of marginalised groups. In adopting a cheaper, more efficient approach to the sharing of knowledge, the disenfranchised were empowered. These artworks follow this method, not only seeking to widen the reach of their collective impact, but to bring into question where we draw the lines that define an exhibition in the first place.

The Adam Reynolds Award is Shape Arts’ flagship award, set up in 2008 in memory of the life and work of sculptor Adam Reynolds. It is designed to support mid-career disabled artists through bursary, residency, and exhibition opportunities. The Many Costs of Living is the 2022-23 ARA Shortlist exhibition, and takes the Awardee’s work as its original inspiration.

Explore

Price’s

In the winter of 2022-23, British Gas owner Centrica acknowledged that the contractor responsible for their debt collection, Arvato Financial Solutions, had been breaking into the homes of vulnerable people to forcibly install prepayment meters. British Gas reported that in 2022, of their customers, approximately 1.5 million were on prepayment meters, 20,000 of which had been installed off the back of a court ordered warrant. In January 2023, following a campaign to raise awareness of the precarity and hardship inflicted upon homes with prepayment meters, Citizens Advice published data showing that one household’s meter is disconnected as a result of missed payments every ten seconds. Polling confirms that of those disconnected every week, 130,000 households included a disabled person, in breach of energy supplier regulations. Furthermore, their research found that the number of people unable to afford their prepayment meter in 2022 was greater than the ten previous years combined. On February 16th 2023, Centrica announced record-breaking profits of £3.3bn - more than triple those it made in 2021.

Building on a decade of expanding waiting lists, strained resources, and declining workforce, the ongoing NHS crisis correlates with continued significant cuts to the overall budget of the healthcare system since 2010 and has been exacerbated by the unprecedented circumstances of the pandemic. In 2021, it was reported that people self-funding medical treatment made up one third of patients for the very first time. In February 2020, prior to the pandemic, there were already 4.43 million people on the waiting list to receive NHS care. As of December 2022, this figure now stands at 7.2 million, according to regularly updated reporting from the British Medical Association. Of those waiting, 406,035 have been waiting longer than a year for treatment - 239 times greater than the same measurement in 2019. In January 2023,

former Health Secretary Sajid Javid outlined a backbench proposal suggesting patients should financially contribute to the cost of appointments to ensure sustainability of the healthcare system.

In December 2022, three people in crisis were helped every minute by Citizens Advice - help which includes food bank referrals and emergency charitable grants. More than half of the 200,000 people they helped through crisis in 2022 were disabled or had a longterm health condition. At the same time, the charity

published new analysis revealing that over a third of all UK adults would fall into crisis were their monthly outgoings to increase by just £20.

Downing Street protest photographed by Alisdare Hickson

Bella Milroy is an artist and writer who lives in her hometown of Chesterfield, Derbyshire. She works responsively through mediums of sculpture, drawing, photography, text, writing and curating. She makes work about making work (and being disabled) and not being able to make work (and being disabled). This process-based practice is fundamental to her as a disabled artist. She is continually motivated by concepts of public and private spaces and where the sick and/or disabled body exists within them, themes which emerge throughout much of her work. She is passionate about contributing to the cataloguing of disabled artists, as well as advocating for better, more accessible and enjoyable working experiences for disabled artists across the industry. Examples of this are found in many of her curatorial projects such as Soft Sanctuary (2019-2021), MobShop (2021), and Further Afield (forthcoming 2023). She is an Artistic Associate at Level Centre, Derbyshire.

Hanecdote

Hannah Hill (Hanecdote) is an illustrative artist from London specialising in hand embroidery and textiles. Her work tells human stories full of bold colourful motifs representing history, sex, disability, politics, and emotions. Hannah is inspired and motivated by humanity’s 40,000-year connection with the needle and thread, connecting us across the globe through time and space. Hannah’s creative practice is informed by chronic pain and disability and the anti-colonial perspective influenced by their mixed Indo-Guyanese and European identity.

Bella Milroy

Justin Piccirilli

Justin Piccirilli (he/him) is currently completing an MA at the RCA. His work is inspired by his journey through his rehabilitation from a life-changing accident. He raises questions about current social issues such as inequality, disablism, mental health, and the body in crisis. The interdisciplinary nature of his practice enables him to experiment with different media from installation to sculpture, dry-point etching, screen printing, and interactive realtime 3D media. At present, he is focusing on using extended reality, coding, and medical data to develop this narrative.

The artists

The Kirkwood brothers utilise text and imagery, often in the form of playful visual puns, to capture snippets of thoughts and memories that are brought forth through conversation between the brothers, evoking their childhood, and their own experiences of disability and mental health.

Kirkwood Brothers

It Feels Like This

It Feels Like This is a process-based artwork using mediums of sculpture and text created by Bella Milroy. Handwritten text is scrawled onto the back of a seemingly ordinary, opened brown envelope, with a return address printed along the edge of the envelope fold. The envelope used in this work is taken from the artist’s own archive of correspondences from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). Motivated by concepts of public and private space and where the sick and or disabled body exists within them, Milroy draws upon the experience of such correspondences and how they enter the home, often in both covert and overt ways; invisible to some, terrifyingly obvious to others. The envelope sits as a sculptural foundation to the handwritten text, acting as both a scrap of paper on which lists are scribbled, and physical material embedded with a host of weighted narratives; the violation of the home; the absence of privacy; the pervasive hostility of the state, and the precariousness of depending upon it to live.

It Feels Like This attempts to speak to this current moment, and the ways in which we are often left without words. We have and continue to experience profound loss, the cost of which feels unceasing. When “normal” is used as a bludgeon to erase, divide, and forget, sitting with our grief becomes powerful. It is in the raw, bruising of heartache that we can action upon hope for things to be better, without ignoring the pain and the loss, and the price that is paid, continuously, along with it.

Bella Milroy

Hanecdote

Down The Drain

The government is selling off our health service, already suggesting that we begin paying for appointments. The impacts of this are disproportionately felt by those most reliant on the NHS: older populations, those living in poverty, and disabled people. The foundational vision of a free at the point of use, taxpayer-funded welfare system has been eroded by profit-seekers determined to line their pockets at any cost. Free healthcare is a human right and until recently underpinned many Briton’s sense of civic pride and community, but the NHS is unlikely to make its 100th birthday.

Down The Drain represents my fears for the future of our NHS, especially as a disabled person with chronic pain. I worry for my community and the wider public. Everyone deserves fair pay and decent working conditions and yet we’ve deprived our most critical workers of such things and left them no option but to strike. With medication supplies running out, avoidable excess deaths constantly rising, ambulance wait-times exceeding 24 hours, healthcare professionals quitting in ever-increasing numbers, and the vulnerable abandoned with the disregarding of Covid precautions, the NHS is going down the drain before our very eyes.

Ingredients:

Living Standards

Inequality

Education

Learning conditions

School meals

Inflation

Pay

Working hours

Services

Rent

Food

Energy costs

Social and medical care

Transport

Eton Mess

Method:

1. Begin by reducing living standards, except for the wealthiest, to increase inequality.

2. Reduce funding in education to decrease the standard of learning conditions.

3. Drop school meals and trim childcare.

3. Slowly depreciate pay while extending working hours.

4. Diminish services while increasing rent, food, and energy costs.

5. Mix together tensions within the public transportation system.

6. Season with crushed social and medical care.

7. Make sure the dish is oven ready, avoid microwaving.

8. Serve cold and let the markets decide the outcome.

Justin Piccirilli

Kirkwood Brothers

The Brothers have used the past six months to explore their individual experiences of disability and depression. The continued rise in the Cost of Living and the frustrations that come with it are the focus of their new work, looking closely at its impact on their mental health and the world around them.

With thanks to...

Charity number 279184