A Dangerous Insinuation
Lydia Morrow responds to ‘We Contain Multitudes’ at DCA
Lydia Morrow is a disabled knitwear designer and multidisciplinary artist. Her work looks at the body, luck, religion, and sensory experience.
‘We Contain Multitudes’ was a group show featuring work by Andrew Gannon, Nnena Kalu, Daisy Lafarge and Jo Longhurst, at DCA in Dundee, 7 Feb - 26 Apr 2026.
Photo: Lydia Morrow
The whole show tries to break loose and springs back, bungee-corded. Disability Art™️ still, so often, keeps me stuck in the body.
Andrew Gannon exposes himself to us, literally. Screen prints of his body leave Klein-blue sweat stains across the gallery, his limb difference in silhouette. Obsessive casting of his own arm is achieved using much the same winding motion that wraps Nnena Kalu’s unspooling glut of material. Her taxidermied bodies feel like they’re waiting for skin, wounds oozing. We are immobilised in the spaces left over by the presence of the artists, insectoid remnants. Repetition is assertive, yes, but of what?
Longhurst’s athletes point their bandaged feet into the air. How many times have I taken the same photo of my legs from my sick bed? The giant bindweed photo-static view from a bedroom window. I feel an urgency to escape another spiralling repetition in her collage.
Daisy Lafarge asks us to romance the sickness, cutting shapes in her kinesiology tape and painting from the floor. I find the invitation intriguing, maybe it’s just over-familiarity with the material and I take all this for granted. My own disabled body is always with me after all. Daisy, as always, brings a sensuality in her writing that I cannot help but flirt with.
I flirt with the spaces where Andrew’s arm was, imagine his whole body sticking out of every cast. I imagine a Nnena for every rhythmic stroke she draws, picture myself dressing her sculptures, arms around the spaces hers made. I imagine Jo’s bindweed crawling out of the photographs and twining around me, around us, these multitudinous artists I conjure in my mind’s eye. I read Daisy’s poems and get hot for the faces emerging from the watercolour bleed of her paintings.
The whole feeling is familiar, the frenzied energy of stasis, the erotic charge of fight or flight in a bodymind that isn’t going anywhere. I wish the show had been called ‘A Dangerous Insinuation’, the name of another of Longhurst’s works, rather than ‘We Contain Multitudes’. I am getting tired of disability programming that asks for acknowledgment of disabled fullness and in many ways stops at that. I want it to feel like more of a threat.