Sunaura Taylor is a self-taught artist who paints with her mouth or toes since she was born with a joint and muscular disability that limits the use of her arms and legs. Besides her work as a painter, she also uses a variety of media in her more activist work:
The messages in these works are clear, and need no explanation. Indeed her website contains very little in the way of text. ‘Piss on Pity’ is a rallying cry in disability rights circles.
Her work deals mainly with her own physical disability, about how she feels marginalised and excluded, treated as an animal or less than human. Her animal rights pictures parallel the socially constructed disability condition, where life is seen as expendable and without value to society. Works such as Culled Male Chicks in a Dumpster epitomise this:
While her images of hens in battery cages reflect the compartmentalisation and claustrophobia as well as the limiting of movement and denial of freedom that disability confers.
Carl Whetham photography 