Windows on the World and Path through the Woods

Telling Encounters was a day-long conference in 2020 on the stories of disabled and neurodivergent people, hosted for the first time online in partnership with HeartEdge via Zoom. The theme of ‘Telling Encounters’ centred on the stories and experiences of disabled and neurodivergent people in how we encounter God, including ministry as disabled and neurodivergent people, and encounters since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns since March 2020. Click here for recordings from the conference. Register for the 2021 conference here.

As part of the conference I organised an online exhibition and art workshop for the conference. The online exhibition uses photographs, drawings, paintings, poems and prose to describe what we see and the window we look through. This could be an actual window in our homes or our particular frame / perspective / experience e.g. as wheelchair user, voice hearer etc. Much thanks to Rachel Noel for putting the exhibition film together. I'm organising another exhibition for this year's conference. Join me this Friday for the preparatory workshop - register here.  

One of my poems, together with poems by Conor Brownlee, Fiona MacMillan and Naomi Lawson Jacobs, was included in an original piece of music generated as part of the conference.

Here are earlier art and disability videos from earlier projects at St Martin-in-the-Fields with which I have been involved. In the first, artists and craftspeople from the congregation speak about their ‘Hidden St Martin’s’ exhibition for the 2016 Patronal Festival. The exhibition reflects on the theme from a variety of different perspectives using ceramics, drawings, films, paintings, photographs, text and textiles. The exhibition was in November 2016.

The second is of vox pop interviews given by participants at Prophets & Seers: Calling from the Edge, the 2016 conference on Disability and Church, organised in partnership between St Martin-in-the-Fields and Inclusive Church. Participants shared their message to the Church.

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June Boyce-Tillman - We Shall Go Out.