You are straight into it with Alison Lapper, no messing around. She enters the
cafe in Shoreham-by-Sea in a wheelchair, accompanied by two assistants: a
tanned, blonde Boadicea in her chariot, ready to do battle. After decades of
painting and dressing herself with her mouth, her back is deteriorating, a
process she cannot halt. The feature that strikes you first, however, is not
her lack of mobility or arms, or even the curious teeth, worn perfectly even
by overuse, but the look in her eyes: a determination not to be dismissed,
before the idea had even occurred to anyone. A denim jacket is draped
artfully over her shoulders until it gets too hot and she shakes it off to
reveal her smooth, oddly unshocking stumps. On her right ear is a black
plastic hearing piece, her Bluetooth phone. She laughs. “As I’m treated like
an alien, I might as well look like one.” Marc Quinn’s Alison Lapper
Pregnant — a ripely monumental 11½ tonnes of Carrara marble — sat on the
plinth in Trafalgar Square igniting more controversy, more common revulsion,
than Tracey’s bed or Damien’s formaldehyde pet shop; and when you meet her,
you feel she loved every minute, every sneer or shudder a personal call to
arms.
She has just helped to judge the Young Brits at Art competition, organised by
the Equality and Human Rights Commission, in which 11- to 19-year-olds were
invited to depict life in Britain. It attracted a deluge of 1,639 works full
of alienation and identity crises, with which this particular judge could
easily identify. She also knows the power of a prize to spur on the
outsider: at 15, she won an art competition, the only time in her life her
mother verged on pride rather than the “pity and revulsion” described in a
social worker’s report. “These young artists feel shut up, as if somebody
has put zips over their mouths. I didn’t have a voice until I was 19.”
She started painting at three, using her mouth and feet, but has no idea what,
since no work was ever kept or encouraged at Chailey Heritage, the hospital
and school where she grew up. “I drew all the time. It wasn’t valued.
Nothing I did was valued. Even today, people assume I don’t pay tax, don’t
drive, don’t have a mortgage. They think my son is my assistant’s son.”
What they can no longer do, however, is convince her of her ugliness. While
doing her fine-art degree at the University of Brighton, one of her tutors
asked a life-changing question: why was Lapper painting so many beautiful
people — wasn’t she running away from herself? “At first I was annoyed, but
then I really started to look at myself.” She began drawing, painting,
making casts of her body parts, pinned naked photographs of herself on the
walls, realising that the similarities with “normal” bodies were greater
than the differences. In the library, she came across a photograph of the
Venus de Milo. “I thought, ‘Bloody hell, that’s me!’ People label me
disabled, deformed, so why is she seen as beautiful?”
Being born with the congenital disorder phocomelia gave her not only the focus
for her talent (“What else could I do?”), but a subject for her work: her
body and its impact on a squeamish world. The disability lobby hasn’t taken
to the feisty artist. “They don’t like me at all,” she groans. “They accuse
me of using my disability to further my career, but don’t we all use what
we’ve got?”
As a result, she seems free of the standard female neuroses about weight and
wrinkles; for Lapper, at 44, her body is an object of fascination, rather
than regret, as she tracks its shifts and changes. “I readjust my life to
suit what my body’s doing. I’m not walking as much. I’m not looking after
myself completely on my own any more. I’m going to be in a wheelchair in the
future. I already have the back of a 70-year-old because I’ve overused it.”
For 20 years, she lived on her own, dressing herself using metal sticks held
in her mouth and suffering for her art in a quite literal sense. Does
painting hurt her mouth? “It makes my jaw ache,” she laughs. “I talk so
much, you’d think my jaw couldn’t possibly ache.” Actually, Lapper needs to
keep painting: her only regular income is from the Mouth and Foot Painting
Artists, for the chocolate-box landscapes they turn into Christmas cards.
In an age when celebrity and media profile are meant to be the oxygen of
success, Lapper’s story is a salutary one. After the ferment of the plinth,
she might have expected her own career to have fizzed; she has been Woman of
the Year in Spain, after all, and in 2003 was awarded the MBE for services
to art. Yet being Nelson’s neighbour has not made her rich, nor even more
saleable. “I did think things were beginning to take off,” she sighs. “But
people don’t want to buy images of a naked disabled woman. They still think
it’s ugly, deformed. We’re not there yet, unfortunately. It’s all right for
Marc to do it, because he’s at one remove. If it’s the artist with the
disability, people don’t know how to deal with you. Someone said of one of
my photographs, ‘If I had that on my wall, I’d feel guilty looking at it
every day.’ Why? Why don’t they feel guilty about all these people we are
making anorexic?
“We pretend we accept each other, but it’s a load of crap.
When Marc’s sculpture first went up, the comment was very negative. It made me
realise how uncomfortable people still are with disability.”
At her Eyestorm Gallery exhibition in 2004, she sold nothing, and she was
advised to change tack. “I was advised to do butterflies and pretty,
commercial art if I wanted to sell. But I don’t want to do butterflies. It’s
not my thing.” Consolingly, she sees herself in the tradition of her hero,
Robert Mapplethorpe, the maverick once shunned for his homoerotic nudes. “I
related to him as an outsider, the disgusting outcast who now sells for huge
money.” She laughs. “Maybe I’d do better if I died a tragic death...”
Recently, Lapper’s creativity has stalled. Partly the problems are practical:
the painful back, childcare, the need to employ a photographer to work the
camera, which has led in the past to wearisome disputes about ownership of
the work. She is also unsure where to go next. Motherhood is what shapes her
life, but she shies from it as a subject. When Parys — miffed to be a mere
bump on the plinth — was four months old, Quinn sculpted the pair of them
again, but Lapper has rarely used her nine-year-old son in her work, wanting
to keep him to herself. In one black-and-white photograph, mother and son
are naked with a pair of pink hands. “Is he being taken away from me, which
has been my biggest fear? Or are the hands helping me so that I can keep
him?”
