Crip Time in the Deep End:

Water and art are elements which invite us to consume and immerse ourselves in spaces outside of the regular bounds of time. Entering the pool, a creek, a bath, a shower, a gallery, can be an intentional slow meditative act of reclaiming one’s time in an overactive world.

When my step dad dropped me off at the pool the other day and asked, how long do you swim for?

I said, “I don’t know, I do the routine my exercise physio gave me until my body’s feeling a bit more free”.

Recently, I’ve started re-inviting my friends to my local Maribyrnong pool with me to see if it helps us to slow down. This has welcomed a lot of forgotten joy into what’s gradually become a solitary routine of swimming to manage chronic pain. It’s not always comfortable to leave the house, or move through routines. Like most things, when we remember ourselves as part of the greater whole, it’s easier to move our self-consciousness to the side and embrace the possibility of ourselves becoming part of communal third spaces.

curtesy that invites viewers, including those unfamiliar with Canberra like myself, into the world of local histories alluded to in this site-specific iteration of Deep End.

Mills reminds me of the visceral enchantment of being small, feeling like the local pool was an ocean I’d happily be swallowed by, or a quilt that could fold me up like a burrito ten times over. Like the feeling of your childhood bedroom being a sensory retreat of all affordable things magical, mystical and out-of-this world; rubbing your hands on a fuzzy lilac diary for hours or squeaking them across the surface of a see-through inflatable chair. Mills’ accompanying large scale inflated pool dumbbells and float that fill the gallery, enhance this familiar feeling of being gently encapsulated, weightless and floating.

Alongside many chronically ill people, I’ve been practicing spending time based on the shifting capacity of how my body feels, which is often referred to by disabled folk as ‘crip time’. Embracing this way of existing rejects the negative notions of deficit which can be placed on individuals who move through the world with different access needs which take time. Not shaming this way of existing questions the ableist onus of laziness around disabled people who are moving through the world at their own pace. Living in an accelerationist society that measures people’s value on their productivity or financial capital, practicing crip time is a radical way of being.

Like many who are denied access to NDIS or systemic support, my life exists in constant negotiation between capitalist time and crip time. I ‘work’ four days a which is my body at its ‘highest functioning’, my version of full-time hours. I get anxious I’m a hypocrite, or not ‘disabled enough’ to write about the gospel of crip time to it’s fullest most embodied sense. But there’s lots of ‘quietly disabled’ people out there who adapt and connect with the world through feeling this sense of time, though this comes at the cost of needing routines to recover, like swimming in the warm water section of my local pool. A negotiated balance that allows myself to reset in an untimed flow, letting the weighted dumbbells resists my body and build new strength.

So far, my twenties have felt like being rushed down the hallway of delayed adulthood. I picture myself in an old colonial house with rooms marked: art school, Covid, lockdowns, therapies, hearing aids, unexplained pains. I spent years in denial chasing the temporality of wellness while being told my labs are normal.

It’s disheartening to see how far we have to go towards having public conversations about disabled and intersectional realities without fear of stigma, even in careers as hypothetically open as the arts or human services. The growing surveillance state isn’t kind, increasingly many don’t feel safe posting on social media and are moving towards offline conversations about politics or disability with friends at our local library, a walk around the park or a swim at the pool.

But, when I connect with art from disabled and neurodivergent peers like Mills and works like ‘Deep End’ through social media or a gallery, I feel less scared and lonely in my imagined internal house of disabled adulthood. Instead, it starts to feel like an unmortgaged home full of possibility where I can paint the walls blue, rewrite the narrative and allow visitors inside. Like the colourful quilts we craft through pain and flare ups, which are the finest art that lies across our beds and can be strung up as flags of good omens. Like the rooms of pools, libraries, and galleries don’t have to stay institutional white cubes, but can be painted glowing hues of blue and yellow. Sometimes with unicorns like Sammy from the Manuka pool who are there to guide us towards a new understanding of ourselves and a slowed sense of time.

Juliet Phraser is an artist and writer based in Naarm (Melbourne). Living with chronic illness and auditory processing disorder, her practice grows out of personal healing and the endurance of care.