Aaron Williamson was the recipient of the 2011 Adam Reynolds Memorial Bursary.

His residency took place at Spike Island, Bristol.

Williamson’s work employs a politicised, yet humorous reading of disability, deconstructing, responding and sometimes mocking social and cultural events presented in the public realm. Informed by his experience of becoming deaf, the work questions and subverts the romantic notion of ‘outsider-ness’, while exploring social exclusion and the role of disability art.

Williamson devises unique video works and performances which are presented in a playful DIY manner, with work created on-site or immediately prior to its public presentation. Process based and often collaborative, the work explores ideas of authenticity, authority and cannon.

For his residency at Spike Island Williamson extended his practice to sculpture. Producing a series of ‘museological’ artefacts and documents based on the imagined archaeological discovery of the Affligare, a fictional tribe of medieval ‘cripple-beggars’, Williamson presented a display of objects and texts, exhibited in the tradition of the ethnography collection.

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