Seattle-based artist Harriet Sanderson expresses herself on her disability by creating powerful images out of wooden canes, wheelchairs, and other unusual media.

By Lori A. Wood

“When I was three, I was on the couch taking a nap, and when I woke up, I was feverish and couldn’t move my right arm,” says Harriet Sanderson, an artist who lives in Seattle now, but who grew up in her native Indiana. “My parents took me to the hospital. That’s really all I remember.”

The little girl was diagnosed with polio. “It was 1950,” Sanderson says. “Most of the people I know who had polio were mainstreamed. My parents never talked about the fact that I had polio. They had high expectations of me, and that’s all I knew. I learned to do things with my left arm, and my legs were basically fine. But I looked weird in the mirror, and I always felt like I was weird.”

Freakiness

“Sometimes, in high school, students used language implying my freakiness,” she continues. “I couldn’t do my hair; every day was a ‘bad hair’ day. Physiologically, I was always a little bit short of energy, and I’d get really tired. Adjusting to the hot and cold climate of the Midwest was also difficult. Other than that, I just took it for granted that I had to adjust to things, so I did.”

Through it all, Harriet had art as a creative outlet. “I always liked to make and draw things,” she says. “My mother had a minor in art in college, and taught me to make block prints and sponge prints at the age of six or seven. Every summer I made Christmas cards, took them around the neighborhood and sold them.”

Despite her love of art, Sanderson went to Purdue and earned a degree in entomology in 1972. “My parents didn’t want me to go to art school,” she says. “They said, ‘You can’t make a living that way.’”

Her first job after college used both her entomology and art skills. “I did scientific illustration for the Indiana State Entomologist’s office, producing drawings of insects for public informational bulletins,” she says. But she wasn’t satisfied. “Realism didn’t serve my purpose. I preferred to express my interior world, and the representational form just didn’t do it. As a young artist, I was never that exceptional, but somewhere inside, I knew I could make good art.”

Sanderson continued her education studying drawing and printmaking at the Indianapolis Art League. “While I became technically proficient,” she says. “I was frustrated about developing a personal message—how could I push the envelope of contemporary art?”

Westward

In 1985, Harriet and her husband moved to Seattle for her husband’s work. At the age of 38, Harriet entered Art School at the University of Washington. Her health declined, but her mind was waking to new ideas that demanded expression in art.

“For a long time, I never considered myself as having a disability, but my health turned for the worse after I began an intense university art program,” she says. “Printmaking is a physically challenging discipline, but I had been making prints for over thirty years already. The disability-related art happened as the result of my left arm hurting so badly. And then I got fibromyalgia, and I hurt all over. I couldn’t do the heavy, traditional work with printing presses.” Still, Sanderson plugged ahead, earning a BFA in 1988 and MFA in 1990. For her Master’s thesis, she developed her own printmaking methods that were “physically easier.”

“Gradually, my arm got more useless, and I couldn’t do any of the printmaking methods anymore. I started making installations, collecting pre-made objects like beds and chairs then rearranging them in odd ways,” she says. An example is Attention Span, 1991, in which a crib-sized mattress is supported by a chair at each end, the piece suggesting two persons, presumably parents, helplessly watching over a sick child.

“When I was commissioned to do a permanent work at a hospital, I decided that I’d work with old-style walking canes, because they’re so beautiful. Nobody uses those anymore because they’re not adjustable, but they still designate disability. I used them in a way that changed the negative designation into a positive, into an attractive architectural detail.”

New Media

“Eventually, I couldn’t do installations, because I was in so much pain,” Sanderson says. As a result, she had to find another way to create. “I started doing a lot of work on the computer. It’s a long learning process, moving from one process to another. Progress is really slow, but I talked to other artists, and they say their progress is slow, too. Computer prints lack the tactile response for artist and viewer alike. I miss those tactile processes, if I let myself think about them, but I try not to.”

As an artist, 60-year-old Harriet endures numerous physical challenges. “I have a lot more restrictions now, including: Post-polio syndrome, fatigue, exhaustion and, primarily, pain, which is the disabling thing,” she says. “My left arm, my good arm, has been overused, because I’ve never been able to use my right arm. The physiological and structural changes in that arm are the primary source of my pain, though it’s also a strong component of post-polio and fibromyalgia. I got the notion that I was an artist who could make a contribution to contemporary art, but I just don’t have the energy to produce enough to get that far ahead in my chosen career. I just don’t have the body to do that.”

Still, Sanderson puts enormous effort and focus into the fewer works she is able to do. Her first large- scale digital print took five years to produce. “It was technically challenging,” she says. “Each section is covered entirely with hairs that were drawn freehand with the Wacom digital pen. This piece was refused by the gallery that commissioned it. It has since been exhibited with positive critical feedback.”

When she’s not creating, she reads and prepares for a series of lectures that she’s giving in 2007. “I’m going to have a solo show in October, so I’ll give a lecture about my work for the opening of that. The Society for Disability Studies (SDS) is having a convention here in Seattle in May. From 2001 through 2006, I worked on a collaborative project, producing a book about children with developmental disabilities. It’s a history of parents in the fifties who decided to keep their kids at home, instead of institutionalizing them. As a result of that, three of us have been invited to do a panel at the SDS meeting, a national academic conference.”

“I don’t make any money at my art,” she explains. “It’s not very commercial, because people can’t accept it as something valid. Most shows I’ve had, I set up myself. Because my work isn’t big and grand, there hasn’t been much critical response outside the Northwest. I just do the best I can with what I have. My disability has strengthened my resolve to keep doing what I do.”

Lori A. Wood is a regular contributor to Action.