About
Jamila Prowse is a self-taught artist whose practice evolved from her sick bed. Across moving image, textiles, writing, painting, photography and more, she makes in order to process complex experiences and emotions around disability, autism, mixed race ancestry and social isolation. She intuitively moves between mediums as a form of play and to respond to fluctuations in her energy and physical symptoms. Informed by fellow crip artists, she experiments with different sensory registers as a commitment to creative access adjustments.
Originally a curator and arts administrator, she came to making after a worsening in her lifelong disability meant she could no longer work in arts organisations. Now, she seeks to unlearn the institutionalisation of her former life and return to art as a site of healing, freedom and resistance.
Previous exhibitions and screenings include V&A, Whitechapel Gallery, Somerset House, South London Gallery, Studio Voltaire, Goldsmiths CCA, (London), Aspex (Portsmouth), Newlyn Art Gallery (Cornwall), NewBridge Project, (Newcastle), TULCA Visual Arts Festival, Ormston House Gallery, (Ireland), and Hordaland Kunstsenter (Norway). Her writing has appeared in Frieze, Art Monthly, British Journal of Photography and elsewhere.