All the three works by Peter Mansell, Dewald Botha and Jodie Taylor inspired me, most of all because, in a way or another, during my life I experienced what they did. I had a car accident when I was 26, I spent some of my work-life in North Mexico, I have (like many other lucky people) nice memories of my childhood. All three left a mark (or a scar) in my life and contributed to mould my character and personality.
If I should choose one of the three, I can easily say that the event that most influenced my life was the car accident of 1986, when I risked my life and spent a part of it recovering from injuries.
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| Image from "Paralysis Unseen" @ https://petermansell.weebly.com/ (accessed 20/3/2017) |
So I would say that the project by Peter Mansell resonates most with myself, even if the impact of injuries on my life where much less heavy. Nevertheless this accident forced me to think about life and death, life values, major or minor handicaps, the sudden lost of something or somebody, the sudden lost of something you can do and will not able to do ever again.
I believe that Peter Mansell made this work mainly for himself: at https://petermansell.weebly.com/ (accessed 20/3/2017) he states that ".....paralysis is as much a cultural experience as it is a physiological one......". I perfectly understand it, since I would do and think the same thing. So, is it really important how we feel about loosing authorial control when somebody else (like I did with Mansell's work) projects their own experience on images we have created? Or is it all about the messages and meanings we want to send to ourselves?
I even believe that the level of authorial control that each of us put in their work is proportional with the level of personal involvement of each author in the story.
