{"id":275623,"date":"2026-05-01T19:35:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-02T00:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/chroniques-dun-crip\/"},"modified":"2026-04-28T12:31:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-28T17:31:09","slug":"crippled-chronicles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/crippled-chronicles\/","title":{"rendered":"Crippled Chronicles"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

These days, people don\u2019t even know what polio means, yet, at its peak in the 1940s and 1950s, it would paralyze or kill over half a million people worldwide every year. Polio, which I contracted in 1953, left me with no muscles in my lower limbs, so, essentially, I walked with my arms for most of my life. Each morning, I would put on heavy, orthopedic shoes, buckle leather and metal braces to my legs, and leverage myself out of bed with my crutches. There were no special needs services, at least not where we lived. I went to the local schools and was determined to try to do what everyone else was doing. A hyper-developed upper body allowed me to walk, climb stairs, swim, travel, study. I became an artist and teacher. In some ways, I acted as if I didn\u2019t have a handicap at all. I just needed to do things differently, be more driven, work a little harder. By the mid-1980s my wife and I were raising four children and renovating a house, while I was rotating between teaching gigs at three different schools and making paintings that were ten feet high and sixteen feet wide. In your thirties, you feel like you can do anything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"In
David Elliott<\/strong>
David Elliott: Pintura<\/em>, exhibition view, Museo de arte moderno, Mexico City, 1993.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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How does a physical disability shape your life? Sometimes, it\u2019s obvious: the impossibility of doing certain things, the inaccessibility of much of the world. Daily activities, from the mundane to the complex, need to be carefully calibrated. Beyond the mechanical aspects of getting through life with part of your body depleted, there are, of course, psychological hurdles. One of the most difficult aspects of growing up with a visible physical handicap is being singled out and belittled, the stares, the pats on the head, the pointed question, What happened to you?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"The
David Elliott<\/strong>
Salle d\u2019attente <\/em>(detail), 2021.
Photo: Paul Litherland, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

In ancient cultures, the crippled were occasionally thought of as exceptional, but more often they were considered a bad omen or evil. I remember when, as a young adult, I walked by the old Greek ladies with their grandchildren on Danforth Avenue in Toronto, they would cover the kids\u2019 eyes when I approached, so I wouldn\u2019t harm or contaminate them. The age-old notion that a physical handicap represents some kind of moral or spiritual deficiency persists. Over the years, devout Christians have tried to heal me by praying or a laying on of hands, telling me that if I wanted to walk all I had to do was allow Jesus into my heart. When the miracle failed to occur, one would-be saviour comically suggested that I stand on strong magnets so that my arm muscles could be pulled down into my legs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The crazy thing about polio is that you must deal with it twice. The original virus attacks motor neurons in the spinal cord, weakening or destroying communication between the central nervous system and the muscles; in my case, this led to 100 percent paralysis in my lower extremities. Then, bam, forty years later, the polio hits you again! In the months following a large exhibition of my work in Mexico City in 1993, my arm muscles began to betray me. They felt like flat tires, depleted, airless. I began to stumble and fall. Post-polio syndrome (PPS) is not a new infection but an indication that the original virus did more damage than you realized. Neurons resemble branches of a tree sending their signals to the body\u2019s muscles. From infancy to middle age, my surviving neurons developed new sprouts, to re-innervate my upper-body muscle fibres. After decades of functioning beyond their capacity, these enlarged motor units begin to break down and shrink back, leading to new muscle weakness, atrophy, and debilitating fatigue. The process is slow but inevitable, with exercise or any kind of exertion only making it worse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"A
David Elliott<\/strong>
Back Deck<\/em>, 2023.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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After the PPS diagnosis, I continued to walk with braces and crutches, using a manual wheelchair on occasion. Gradually, the wheelchair became a necessity, and eventually I replaced it with a motorized one. In many ways, it is during this second phase of polio that I have felt the full impact of a handicapped life; I struggle to do the simplest domestic and studio tasks without muscle pain, and I\u2019m staring at the very real possibility of becoming a quadriplegic. Up to 2013, I continued to work on large canvases, sometimes with the help of a studio assistant. Since then, I have concentrated on the production of small-scale collage boxes, three-dimensional dioramas like the ones that used to serve as maquettes for paintings. My home studio has been set up with saws, cutting boards, worktables, and shelving that allow me to construct these miniatures with minimal wear and tear on my arms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I miss the \u201cwow factor\u201d of my paintings, although I have come to appreciate the intimacy and quieter poetics of the boxes. During the COVID lockdown, I made small shrine-like spaces that explored the beauty of curling into oneself. Recently I have been making dioramas of my former studios. In some ways these tributes are nostalgia trips, revisiting more-glorious moments in my career. However, with their attention to minor detail, they are also testaments to the down-to-earth ordinariness of artmaking. Alone in a room, large or small, with makeshift furniture, plugging away, trying to create something of significance.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Over the years, I have sometimes been asked about how my disability has shaped my work. In all honesty, I\u2019m never sure. In a 2016 interview with Border Crossings<\/em>, I suggested that the bricolage aspect of my work was perhaps related to the fractured nature of my body. There is probably some truth to this, although my love of collage stems from many other factors. There are some direct references to disability in my work. In several of my undergrad paintings of interiors, I included crutches as part of my daily paraphernalia, often leaning in the corner against a wall. More recently, the crutches have resurfaced, and a wheelchair sometimes appears as a kind of self-portrait. Mostly, however, references are more covert, things that are coded in a certain way for me that might mean something else to others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although I generally resisted associating myself with the handicapped, of course, I knew I was one of them. During my teens, as I became more absorbed in cultural pursuits, I started to notice how the disabled were depicted and undertook to assemble a personal pantheon of handicapped artists and of artworks that reference physical disability. For most people, the first striking fictional examples of the disfigured are Frankenstein, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Captain Ahab from Moby Dick<\/em>. These unforgettable characters raise issues of prejudice and persecution, resentment and anger. Over time, I realized that disabled villains were a common trope: Shakespeare\u2019s Richard III, Dr. No, Dr. Strangelove, Mr. Glass in Unbreakable<\/em>, the evil robber baron Mr. Potter in Frank Capra\u2019s It\u2019s a Wonderful Life<\/em>,Joseph the club-footed informer in Louis Malle\u2019s Au revoir les enfants<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the visual arts, the most recognized and celebrated polio victim is certainly Frida Kahlo. Kahlo\u2019s polio, which she contracted when she was six, left her with a weakened and deformed leg, which she liked to hide under long skirts or in trousers. Although her bout with polio was superseded by the injuries she sustained, twelve years later, in a terrible bus accident, in her journals she references the importance of her time in bed with polio. She describes how she fogged up the glass on her windowpane and drew a door, which she then travelled through to meet a joyful, alternate self who understood her completely, and how this friend, this other Frida, stayed with her throughout her life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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For me, there is something empowering about viewing the work of fellow cripples, such as paraplegic Mark di Suvero, one-armed Jordi Bonet, and late-career Chuck Close, whose rehabilitation from spinal artery collapse inspired his most astonishing canvases. I\u2019m hardly an activist, but I understand the agitprop aesthetic associated with identity politics, including disabled art.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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During a recent trip to the United Kingdom, I managed to see the impressive Donald Rodney survey Visceral Canker<\/em> (2025) at the Whitechapel Gallery, and I would have enjoyed seeing Sharona Franklin\u2019s Crip Sweet Home<\/em> (2024) in Montr\u00e9al, but, rather ironically, it was presented in an inaccessible space. On the other hand, I have no problem with non-disabled artists who have made overt, sometimes extravagant reference to disability and deformity. In fact, I identify with much of it. At the Prado, I feel kinship looking at Diego Vel\u00e1zquez\u2019s penetrating individual portraits of the buffoons and dwarfs from the royal court. I can instantly relate to Eadweard Muybridge\u2019s Infantile paralysis; child walking on hands and feet<\/em> (1887) and Francis Bacon\u2019s subsequent use of the image in his paintings, as well as the gentle humanism of Ben Shahn\u2019s Red Stairway<\/em> (1944), in which a one-legged man with crutches gingerly mounts an enormous set of stairs. The photographs of Diane Arbus and Joel-Peter Witkin have special meaning for me, as does Tod Browning\u2019s ground-breaking film Freaks <\/em>(1932). In “Meal Ticket”, one of the episodes in the Coen brothers\u2019 The Ballad of Buster Scruggs <\/em>(2018), the tossing of the quadriplegic performer into a river to drown by his handler gave me shivers of recognition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"A
David Elliott<\/strong>
Studio w Phantom Engineer<\/em>, 2023.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m one of the last polio victims in this country and my art will inevitably somehow reflect this reality, but it needn\u2019t be prescriptive. Perhaps, in future, I will allow aspects of my disability to appear more openly, but the important thing is to inhabit your skin however you can, to find your voice, and to persist, simply and resolutely persist. That is its own kind of statement. In the end, I like what photographer and polio survivor Dorothea Lange had to say about her disability: \u201cI think it is perhaps the most important thing that happened to me, and formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me, and humiliated me. All those things at once. I\u2019ve never gotten over it and I am aware of the force and power of it.\u201d2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - Suzanne Riess, Dorothea Lange: The Making of a Documentary Photographer<\/em>, interview (Regional Oral History Office, University of California, Berkeley, 1968), 18.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cI remember when polio was the worst thing in the world.\u201d\u200a
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