Opulent Mobility interview with Joy Murray

Thanks to Joy for sharing your art with us!

Welcome to the Opulent Mobility Substack! I’m A. Laura Brody, the founder of Opulent Mobility, which is a series of exhibits that ask artists to re-imagine disability as opulent and powerful. Thanks so much for joining me.

Please enjoy my interview with painter Joy Murray, one of the artists in the latest Opulent Mobility exhibit. In her own words:

“I’ve used the arts to help navigate life, cope with a long term disability -- to find enchantment and insight… I like to encourage everyone to get on with their creative work. We all have unique stories to tell in unique ways. There are so many ways we are told through our lives to conform, to be quiet, and to not stir up trouble. I hope to resist that in my life and to help others resist. What we hide, what we cloak in shame, becomes toxic and keeps us from living fully. We are meant to learn and share our thoughts all through our lives. I hope to do what it takes to keep my sense of wonder alive and to report it back to you.  I've had hereditary Spasmatic Paraparalysis, a degenerative neurological disorder similar to Multiple Sclerosis, since I was 16.  I've graduated from using a cane, then a walker, and now a wheelchair.  I also have a mild bi-polar disorder that leans to the depressive side.”

ASL interpretation by Joe Roger Rivera Perez.

This interview transcription has been edited for clarity.

Interview with Joy Murray

Laura What got you involved with Opulent Mobility? I don't remember how you found out about this.

Joy Well, it's interesting because I was on Facebook and was hacked. I couldn't report it as a fake account because they had taken my password and my email address. So I quit and I was off for about a year. My adult son travels a lot and he wanted me to get back on so he could show me where he was going and what he was doing. So I did. And of course, I started looking, you know, for old friends and for people involved in disability rights. And I found your thing that way through Facebook and it was like, you know, the day before the deadline. And I was like, I want to enter this. This sounds beautiful. You know, it's wonderful. The pieces that you chose are from a series that I'm doing called Look Closer, which is on disability, sensuality and beauty. And I figured it would be a good fit. And I also was so impressed with your work.

Laura Well, thank you.

Joy Because when I started doing artwork, I would make fabric figures and dolls like wheelchair mermaids and goddesses based on Egyptian mythology and the whole idea of transformation being an empowering thing. And that when the gods got their heads cut off or whatever, they transformed into something else. And they found a new power that way. So my philosophy of visual art started with that. And then my hands got too weak to do that kind of a sewing and intense handwork. So I started drawing and painting. And the same philosophy has kind of bled over, and has kept with me.

Laura Beautiful paintings. What can you tell us about Desire Seemed to Expand?

Joy This was the first piece of the series. And I began to think about, I started thinking about pain and sex, essentially, you know, having pain and being immobilized doesn't stop sexual desire. In many ways, it increases it because it is a great pain reliever to love someone, to love someone physically, especially if you are sensory intact. It's just an incredible way to feel release from whatever limits that your body or your illness is putting upon you. But because you're in a wheelchair or you're in a situation where scars show or your body is different, it's very hard to find someone who can look beyond that and see the gold flowing inside you. And then I decided to keep moving forward with those ideas.

Laura Did you find that painting was easier to work with for your hands?

Joy Yes, absolutely. I use mostly acrylic paint. I also do watercolor and collage. In this piece there are little box cutter knives in it collaged into it where there are certain pain points. And so there's a lot of layering of color and texture in there.

Laura And text?

Joy Yeah. That's the other thing about my work. My creative life, I started as a writer, I had several short stories published and I wrote a novel and stuff like that, but that made me feel very vulnerable in the writing world. I still write a blog and I write short things. But painting seems less; it makes me feel less vulnerable and there’s a sense of immediacy to it. And I can also put the poetry or the idea into it in an artful way. There are a lot of people who think that language and painting should be far, far apart; that the person should be able to tell what you mean or make their own meaning out of the painting. And I just don't believe that at all.

Laura I think it's your painting and you get to do what exactly what you want. But it also really adds a nice touch to it. From here I can see just little snippets of the text and some of it is a little harder to read, but some of it's not. So many desires would go unmet. Nerve endings died, but pain? Some of it I can't see as clearly. Are there things from here?

Joy Nerve endings died, but pain continued, I think.

Laura One of the things I love about different artworks is when they are layered and you can see so many different possibilities inside of them, and that there's always more to look at. I think that your pieces really have that.

Joy And in a piece like this that has lots of little brushstrokes, it's an escape from pain also, you know, just getting lost in the little brushstrokes is very; it just puts me in another zone.

Laura Nice. Oh, it's a flow state kind of thing.

Joy Right. It's always been something I've promoted with people who suffer from chronic pain or who have mental problems or who, you know who have any kind of different ability that they have to deal with, that art can put you in that state where you don't feel so alone and you don't feel the pain as much.

Laura Do you find that your flow state is different from painting versus writing? Because I have found that my process is very different with that. And it was a really interesting thing to find out.

Joy It's a little different, yes, but with both of them, I can get in a zone where I, you know, I forget to eat.

My disability began when I was 16 with seizures and it was undiagnosed until I was in my 40s and then I got a wrong diagnosis. So I really did not get a diagnosis until I was 50, but it was a degenerative disease. It's hereditary spastic paraplegia. It's one of the rare diseases. So I went from being ambulatory to using cane, using a walker, and then now I'm using wheelchair pretty much full time, although I can fully stand and make transfers, but that may not always be true. That has affected my lower body more than my upper body and I have weakness in my upper body, but it's still functioning pretty well.

Laura Do you find the wheelchair makes things easier?

Joy Yeah, it makes things easier. Yes, it does and as far as getting around and pain management goes, it makes things harder as far as visiting friends and going places, so.

Laura Yeah, access is really the key problem 'cause these are things that actually help us out. We should be able to go places in them.

Joy Yeah, you should be able to get there and be able to get into the building.

Laura (Laughing) That would be helpful, and turn around and use the bathroom, all those things.

Joy Some cities do much better than my city. Memphis has a lot more poverty and in-fighting with politics and things like that. So it's hard to get them to concentrate on things like curb cuts and making sure that the ADA is enforced.

Laura Yeah, it's frustrating and causes trouble everywhere. But as you say, some places are much more so than others and it is much harder when the neighborhood doesn't have a lot of money.

Joy Right, oh god, yeah. And it's this enveloping thing, thing. First, you get the disability, then you can't get places and you can't make good, you can't make money so you don't have the money to get to the places. It's just bad.

Laura It's a bad cycle.

Joy Yeah, and that's part of why I want to do art like this because we're people who deserve to have a full life, you know, and I don't understand why it's so hard for us to get integrated into society. I don't understand why people don't think scars and wrinkles are beautiful things. Because they are, they’re signs of survival. You know, it's a hard world and anybody who makes it through a trauma or even just through life, their faces; their bodies are going to change where we just worship this youthful look that doesn't even really exist. It's all Photoshopped and created by people from another planet, I think, you know, and none of us really fit that.

Laura On that note, I wanted to share the other piece in the show because this is a beautiful piece. And I think that really shows what you're talking about, about creating that kind of beauty and love.

Joy Right, right. Well, I like Klimt. But you know he's from a different time. And he has a different sense of what beauty is. And so I really wanted to use his Kiss, which is very male dominant, and put somebody in a wheelchair getting her kiss on. And where the heads are more even, where it's not the one over the other, where they're more equal. Yeah, and the male figure on his knees by the figure in the wheelchair with his little curled feet. It was really fun to create and so there is actually no language in the piece because it's so much based on The Kiss. I think people understand what is what I'm trying to say here. The color is celebrating, but the color tells the story.

Laura It really does. And it has such a glow, which is also something I really love about Klimt but this feels like it's celebrating the two and not just the background, whereas a lot of time with Klimt the people sort of become the background and...

Joy Right. Well, that was the thing as I continued, I was talking to different people with disabilities, obviously my art is not, you know, like portraiture, but I was talking to people about it and asked if they would, you know, let me take some pictures of them for my series and there was a lot of resistance and shame.

Laura Interesting.

Joy And fear of how they would be represented. And it kind of stopped me, like, I felt like I was being invasive. I don't know. I just asked the wrong people.

Laura It might just be that, because you know, people are people and everybody's got their own reasons for not wanting things but I bet you if you put this out there in the disability arts community and started asking, you could find some people who'd be totally willing to.

Joy Well, I have one called the Color of Air where a person has a permanent tracheal apparatus, and she had posted a picture of herself with it. She's had it for decades. And I made it based on her, and it's kind of a gender ambiguous person in it. And she really liked it, so she was very encouraging. But I have enough insecurities myself that that when a few people kind of put me off, and I had an agreement to go take pictures of someone who had vitiligo, a disorder where your skin is different colors. I think it’s beautiful. And he didn't want to commit to it. He was an older man, probably in his 70s. And it just stopped me. I wondered if I was being invasive and I thought, well, maybe I should stop. But I kind of have to do it. It's in my head all the time. I'm just doing it slowly.

Laura I think it's totally worth doing.

Joy I'm just going to make it up.

Laura I mean, there are a lot of people I think it would be very willing. And it's just a question of maybe putting it out there. Because sure, some people aren't going to want it and they're gonna feel uncomfortable, but I’m willing to bet you can find folks. And, if the people are further away, I know people have been doing photo series from Zoom. So you can totally do it that way as well.

Joy Yeah, that's a good idea. There's a couple more I would like to do just based on other art, you know, famous art. I wanna do The Promenade with someone in a wheelchair on the promenade and an able -bodied person flying along behind them, you know, the power is the person in the chair and the overwhelming floating love is the person behind them, you know, floating. But I also just wanna do paintings based on what comes out from the relationship I feel with other people and what's going on in my own heart and head, so.

Laura Yeah. Here's to more of that.

Joy Yeah, I've done some on mental illness where I talk about what's going on in their head, through their hair, you know, or have things going out of their hair and things like that. My brother had paranoid schizophrenia. Mental health is also a big issue that we don't wanna look at. We don't wanna look at people who behave differently or are neurologically divergent. So I try to paint those into beautiful things too.

Laura Absolutely. And I think for some people, it's a point of terror, honestly. They don't want to think about it, it’s as though it would be contagious. And it's not how most things work.

Joy Well, I think people are afraid to face the mortality and you're like a talking piece of mortality.

Laura But you're also a real human being in the world who is living and showing that this isn't necessarily the end of the world. There are different options for the way people look and feel and are. And many of them aren't really what you see in magazines.

Joy Right. Right. Which is what is so important about this show that you're doing and the perspective of opulence. I loved the woman who painted the cover of the brochure for the show. Rachel, she talked about, you know, how somebody cutting up her food and sharing it with her, and then she painted this really celebratory painting of that and how what a tender and loving act that was.

Laura It is.

Joy Yes, it is. And both people can feel that instead of it being, oh, I have to do this for you or I have to have this done for me. It can be if you broaden your vision, again, it can be a very bonding and sensual act.

Laura Yeah, absolutely.