Artist Statement

Athena Cooper is an award-winning visual artist and creativity coach based in Calgary, Canada. Self-taught as an acrylic painter, Athena’s paintings are explorations of what it means to live an extraordinary, ordinary disabled life.

Born with the rare genetic disorder, Osteogenesis Imperfecta (aka ‘brittle bone disease’), and a wheelchair user since the age of six, Athena grew up navigating an ill-fitting narrative about being disabled in our society.

On one end of the spectrum is the highly medicalized representation of the disabled body that typically focuses on pain, deformity and lack of function. Frida Kahlo’s surrealist self-portraits depicting the painful and distorting aspects of her body and her disability are an example of how this interpretation of disability has shown up in the world of art.

On the other end of the spectrum is the objectification of people with disabilities as “super crips” that are held up as inspirational for simply living with their disability. This viewpoint has become even more prevalent with the rise of social media and is articulately critiqued in Stella Young’s TED talk, “I’m Not Your Inspiration, Thank You Very Much”.

Through her paintings, Athena highlights the ways that a disabled life is different, but also incredibly ordinary. Whether it’s challenging the asexual perception of people with disabilities by highlighting the interabled relationship with her husband or depicting her wheelchair with a neutral emotional charge more typical of a piece of furniture, these are all ways that she seeks to shift the narrative away from the exceptional nature of disability to a more normative, inclusive viewpoint.

Her landscape paintings are also a commentary on the way people with disabilities are assumed to exist only in interior spaces. Be it a startling sunset or a burst of light through the trees, these pieces speak to the notion of “I was there and, for a fleeting moment, this is what I saw.”

The intense colour and fractured light found in Athena’s paintings are strongly influenced by her love and affinity for stained glass. She has been particularly drawn to the work of Louis Comfort Tiffany and spent several years doing studies of his glass work to learn how to replicate the look of stained glass in paint. One of Tiffany’s great innovations was this notion of creating beauty from imperfection. Before his work, perfect glass was supposed to be clear, pure and even in tone. Tiffany-style stained-glass however is a riot of colours and textures that capture, manipulate and shatter the light coming through it in dozens of different ways.

Through paint, Athena seeks to similarly emulate that beautiful imperfection as a metaphor for her own fragile body. The images she creates appear to pass through her own glass-like nature to become windows into how she sees the world.