Not Going Back to Normal is a collective disabled artists manifesto, created in Scotland in 2020. Below is a gallery of 49 artworks and texts responding to our call for ideas for a radically accessible arts world. We’d like you to enjoy, think about and be provoked by all these works, and what they represent together.,

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For a future without normality,

Harry Josephine Giles and Sasha Saben Callaghan

A line drawing of a man with his arms raised up, one becoming a tree branch.
Text: We ought to have been feral
Text: Let's refer to health as the state of being useful to capital
Text: What's left after a day listening to DWP hold music? Is it so easy to make art then?
A digital image of a monarch butterfly flying through hoops
Text: Everyone has needs, everyone requires suppport. These are not disability things. They are people things.
Text: At what point does your body stop being yours and just become occupied territory?
Text: I know the extraordinary strength it takes to keep reaching out to a world that doesn't know I exist.
A double exposed polaroid photograph showing a mouth and nose
A satirical health warning: some people will still be at risk when lockdown ends
Text: I have been in lockdown for eight years
Black text spray painted onto white paper: if the system cripples you you must cripple the system
Text: Arts organisations treat Disabled and Deaf artists differently – they don’t see our work as quality, they don’t understand the politicalness of it. They judge it as inferior. That needs to change.
Text: It's like being given the right materials to build my own home where all are welcome
Text: On a chopping board wooden domes spell words in braille
"imagine getting up, dressed and out of the house," is written across a white background with a black border. Inside the text there are black and white flowers in a field.
Text: Hating the word "vulnerable" used to describe me sheltering. Really a word for self-imposed house arrest
Text: The Ableism of Networks
Text: i always keep a hairbrush in case you need me for a new poster or promise
Text: We are not a sideshow to your main event
Paper and watercolour animation: A pale eye watches a blue bird
Text: How can we win equality for disabled people if we are a viciously unequal society?
A pen and ink sketch of a person sitting in a city
Text: Scary. Outsider. Unqualified. Disaster.
Text: A bin with a blustering wheeze / Coughed out the prophecies
A person in a tan suit and hat looks at a bottle of pills while singing into a microphone
A brightly coloured drawing of a party.
Text: where cavernous galleries / open / up
Text: We want the 'new normal' to be a force for reckoning
A person with red lipstick, a sparkly silver top and a fake fur coat is winding the handle on a large musical instrument.
Text: The ill and disabled have an accumulated wisdom of how to deal creatively with constraint and pain
Text: You’re in a queue in a supermarket, you hear someone behind you mutter about not keeping distance, you know they’re talking about you
An abstract painting of a landscape in pastel colours.
A pencil and crayon drawing of a crossroads
Text: Hopping out the door, away from the dominant culture and the mac and cheese
A photo of a nude person with damp hair leaning against a wall
Text: In many ways the COVID lockdown has only made the experience of opening night a pleasure for me
Text: Let's instigate a cultural takeover
Text: I found something Victorian, something sinister, something that would creep up on you in the dark...
Text: No Bread
Text: Hessian fabric sculpture of a kirtle
Text: Your chronic avoidance is worse than my chronic illness
A small model of a doll's house with black and white decoration
Text: Consider the grand lockdown a preview of your own personal lockdown from which society might not bother to help you out.
A painting of a person in a blanket sitting in a blue chair, with scribbled scratchings across it.
A collage of political and artistic imagery
Text: We’ve become grateful for crumbs, for any sign of ourselves in the public eye. But why not dream bigger?
Text: Take your time, go mad, take over the world
Embroidered text: You never heard me sing because I never sang for you