SPARK Disability Arts Festival

By Stephen Hunt

Every December, there’s an art festival that is a little bit more than an art festival.

It’s a lifeline.

That’s what the SPARK Disability Arts Festival has been for over 450 artists with visible and invisible disabilities who have had their work exhibited, and sold, since the festival launched at Studio C back in 2010, says festival director Roxanne Taylor.

For the 2018 festival alone, Taylor says SPARK received 191 visual art submissions from around the world. They ended up featuring 85 different works created by 52 artists, each of whom has a different story.

At the 2015 festival, one of the artists featured was Paula Timm, a woman who went into hospital for laparoscopic surgery to remove her colon, and ended up with an accidentally-severed aorta that caused her to die for a while on the operating table—until she came back to life.

Following that unfortunate series of events, Timm faced a long, uncertain recovery period at home, part of which she dealt with by painting and accessing her creative side.

“I found Studio C actually into my second year of healing,” Timm said, in a 2015 interview with the Calgary Herald. “Their message—in addition to the messages I was following—basically, live a creative life and figure out how to do that.

“Although it’s been a traumatic event,” she says, “what I focus on today is really the blessings that have come from it and the ultimate message that I got from my life-altering surgery was: live life with creativity and joy.”

Paula Timm and her work | Photo: Courtesy of SPARK Disability Arts

Why Does it Matter?

According to figures provided by Taylor, 13.7% of Canadian adults experience disability, and one in five faces mental health challenges, yet overall, Canada lags when it comes to providing a platform and exhibition opportunities for artists with disabilities.

The SPARK Festival, she adds, fills in that gap. It’s the largest and longest-running disability arts festival in Calgary.

“We are excited to be at the forefront of this critical movement, providing arts programs and services to marginalized communities with barriers to cultural access,” Taylor said, in an emailed reply to a question.

Festivals such as SPARK, she added, offer participating artists an assortment of benefits, including overcoming under representation in mainstream media and society, helping society to better understand the concept of inclusion and accessibility, provide safe spaces for disability artists to confront—and resist—social stereotypes and stigmas, as well as a chance to earn money—the artists keep 90% of the money the sale of their artwork generates.

Melanie Marcotte’s Mel’s Rainbow Life | Photo: Courtesy of SPARK Disability Arts

For Timm, the catastrophe of that botched surgery that led her to exhibiting her work at SPARK changed her life, in all the right ways.

She left a career in oil and gas, when she was chosen as one of the first tenants at cSPACE, the art hub in the King Edward School.

“There are so many different things Calgary has, like the SPARK Disability Festival, Studio C, Calgary Arts Development—there are these entry points to get involved, to showcase your art in a very honourable way, in some really cool facilities,” she says.

And along the way, Timm has become a kind of creative mentor for people who drop in to cSPACE, wondering if there’s a way to ignite their own creative lives.

“One person came to a drop-in night I have on Wednesdays, where I get anybody to come in for $20 to participate in some kind of expression activity, whether it’s writing, painting or hanging out and knitting,” she says.

“Whenever someone saunters in, I give them the cSPACE spiel—and when they left, someone said don’t you get tired of giving that? And I said no. It fuels me. It inspires me. That’s why I didn’t want a studio with no public facing environment.

“The fact that I get to keep encouraging others—whether it’s to help them or help them think, okay, art is not that scary. It’s a place for us to play, and wonder, and experience even as non-professional artists.”

For Taylor, the most surprising aspect of her job is the exceptional quality of the submissions for each subsequent SPARK Festival.

“I’m not so much surprised, but rather always impressed by the incredible quality of artwork that is submitted to SPARK,” she says. “The festival accepts a broad range of two- and three-dimensional media, and I love to see the diversity of works submitted. We’ve exhibited everything from photography, drawing, painting, encaustic, found objects, fibre, ceramics and glass to digital and video art.

“As a practicing artist myself, I find each SPARK showcase to be fantastically inspirational. It’s also thrilling to see emerging and established artists represented side-by-side.

“I’m filled with excitement knowing that this talent represents Calgary’s next wave of professionals,” she says. “It’s rewarding for me as a festival producer to create personal connections with the artists, and I feel privileged to be able to share in their life stories.”

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