DIVIDED PORTRAITS: Identity and Disability

In portraiture, the head always comes first. In human communication, the head - indeed the eyes - always come first, too. But with people in wheel chairs, the thing that comes first, and the thing that sets all priorities, is that odd chair. It tells the able-bodied at once and forever that the disabled are profoundly different. And that is not true.

These Divided Portraits are painted to right that wrong perception in a deeply visual and emotional way. The portraits are divided; we are not. The portrait painter, Hilary Cooper, spent some time in a wheel chair, when she broke her neck in 1995; for a while it appeared she would spend the rest of her life there. She knows what people in chairs know and the able-bodied do not: The head comes first for all of us. We are all in the chair. We are all walking around.

She believes that portraiture, which is as old as art itself, is peculiarly well placed to help "correct" wrong views of the disabled and put us all more accurately in touch with one another and with - is the blessed, the grateful, the life-granting realization, "I am still me!" Ms. Cooper hopes that these Divided Portraits show that, able-bodied or disabled, our humanity is intact.