Cripping Breath is a collaborative project emerging from a major interdisciplinary research programme, bringing together disabled artists with lived experience of respiratory illness and mechanical ventilation.
Developed through a long-term partnership with the University of Sheffield and supported by the Wellcome Trust, the project explores breathing not only as a medical condition, but as a social, political, and cultural one.
Bringing together the work of artists Rachel Gadsden, Christopher Samuel and Liberty Bligh, the project foregrounds lived experience as a vital form of knowledge and artistic practice.
Working across installation, text, and interdisciplinary forms, the artists offer deeply personal and critical perspectives. Their work challenges dominant narratives around illness and disability, repositioning lived experience as a site of authorship and resistance.
The artists will participate in a collaborative residency running in 2026 and early 2027, culminating in an exhibition at The Art House in late 2027.
Emerging in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Cripping Breath opens up urgent conversations about life and the conditions that shape who gets to breathe safely. The project extends into wider social and structural questions, including air pollution, poverty, housing, and access to care.
At its core, Cripping Breath is a project about interdependence between bodies, technologies, environments, and systems, and about rethinking how we understand breath itself.
Image credit – Louise Atkinson
