Wheelchair motion as drawing

2 min readJul 1, 2021

Projects or artists who use a wheelchair to draw.

Present and absent (2009)

The artist Sue Austin part of the Freewheeling group used white marking fluid to make various pieces outdoors and indoors from the back wheels of her powered wheelchair. A paint release system is attached to the chair that feeds through tubbing to a brush which is pressing against a rear wheel.

She describes her works as:

“exploration of the mark making possibilities of my power wheelchair produced by play.”
“find a material, indexical expression of the sense of agency, freedom and expansion engendered by the experience of using a ‘power’chair”

A pavement with a white paint imprint of a wheelchair tire tread. The powered wheel of the wheelchair is visible making the imprint. — Tire treads

One part of the work took place through Plymouth city centre, connecting a trail between two University buildings which where part of the exhibition.

A close up city view of the streets and roads Plymouth. A purple line shows a fairly linear route across the city, in the center of the route the path diverges into a square before rejoining. — Map of Plymouth showing proposed route for trail

BA Show - Freewheeling, Present and Absent (2009)

An underlying concept of this work is that of the presences and absences created by socio-cultural concepts around…

www.wearefreewheeling.org.uk

EnayBall

A 3D printed tool which clamps a ink pen head to the front of a wheelchair. Featured in the Draw to Perform international festival (https://drawtoperform.com), UK 2018. It involved a mixture of freeform drawing, connect the dot style drawing and working on a large, shared canvas.

A metal fork frame is attached to a wheelchair with a pen head on the end. Paper tapped on the floor is being drawn on. — Enayball prototype

https://www.enayball.com

Martin Vogel

Martin Vogel is a California based artist who uses a combination of wheelchair drawing and painting. He uses the front wheels combined with acyrlic paint to create abstact pieces which capture the fluid curves of wheel motion. He describes the line work as capturing motion and the color as the feeling.