Together! 2012 CIC’s Artistic Director Dr Ju Gosling aka ju90 writes: In January 2026 we invited self-defined Disabled women to submit one self-portrait each for the Reflecting Ourselves exhibition, with guaranteed acceptance subject to our Safer Spaces policy.
The response was so overwhelming that there are 50 self-portraits in this exhibition. Most of them are recent, and more than a few have been created especially for Reflecting Ourselves. Disabled women have pictured ourselves in a vibrant and defiant display of pride, despite all of the barriers and prejudice that we face on a daily basis.
The images in Reflecting Ourselves span a wide range of media, including painting and drawing, ceramics, sculpture, collage, embroidery, photography, digital images and installation. The artists come from across the UK, from a wide range of backgrounds and ages, and at every stage in their careers. (We acknowledge, though, that the portrayal of living beings is very problematic within Islam. Other Disabled women lack access to the support and equipment that they would need to create, and therefore not every Disabled woman is able be visible here.)
Nancy Willis. Living in Colour. 2026. Digital Photograph. Thanks to Ilsa Colsell and Talula Noor.
We organised the exhibition to celebrate International Women’s Month in March 2026. In the past, Disabled women have been mostly invisible during International Women’s Month, apart from projects organised by Disabled people’s organisations. For many years Disabled women have been stereotyped as asexual and genderless, so our needs have been ignored within issues relating to contraception, sexual health, abortion, childbirth and parenting. Almost a third of unpaid carers are Disabled, but that has usually been ignored too. However, all this has never stopped us from doing it for ourselves.
We have been delighted to have the support of Nancy Willis for this exhibition. (You can view Nancy’s presentation of her work on 6 February here.) Nancy has pioneered contemporary self-portraits of Disabled women, and has been a role model for many of us. The inclusion of her work within the Tate Britain’s 2023 Women in Revolt! exhibition of feminist art from the 1970s and 1980s was ground-breaking. We are very pleased that Nancy has created a new self-portrait, Living in Colour, especially for Reflecting Ourselves.
Ju Gosling aka ju90. Adre. 2026. Digital image.
It has been a great pleasure for me to have the honour of creating this exhibition. Self-portraits have always been an important part of my own practice, as I discussed in my presentation on 30 January (here). The new self-portrait I have created for Reflecting Ourselves is called Adre, which is Welsh for ‘at home’. I have deliberately incorporated elements of past self-portraits, such as the stick with the handle carved in the shape of a seal from my very first self-portrait series My Not-So-Secret Life as a Cyborg (1997), and blending in a different background behind a cut-out figure, as in Perception I-IV (2003). Mainly, though, it responds to Housebound, an image that I didn’t include in my presentation. I created Housebound in 2010 for a project by the late David Morris, who was the inspiration for Together! 2012 CIC. Long before I became a permanent shielder, I saw myself as trapped in the house.
Today, though, at Together! 2012 CIC, home is a place to create and engage with art; home is where the art is. We welcome all Disabled people to engage with our free online arts Clubs programme, delivered by Disabled artists, and we welcome everyone to our free online events programme, led by and featuring Disabled artists. You can keep up to date by joining our mailing list here. As our slogan says: Together we can change our world.