Scottish Art Unlocked
Scottish Art Unlocked
Scottish Art News, Flemming Collection | 2020
“The arts have the capability and a responsibility to be at the forefront of dismantling our old normal into one of a new expectancy.”
Written during the first Covid-19 lockdown, this article reflects on disability, access, and adaptation within contemporary art practice. As an artist shielding throughout lockdown, McLachlan’s interview highlights the restrictions of the pandemic within a much longer lived reality, writing:
“The restrictions many able-bodied artists have now experienced echoes one of familiarity that myself and many others living with impairments have faced throughout their lives and careers.”
Drawing on her experience of delivering Scope - a photography workshop developed for people living with long-term health conditions - McLachlan explores photography as an “accessible, immediate and powerful tool” for reclaiming perspective within familiar or restricted environments. When lockdown forced the project online, the shift revealed both new possibilities for access and the longstanding failures of arts institutions to meaningfully include Disabled artists and audiences.
The article also reflects on how virtual working, long framed as an inconvenience or exception, suddenly became standard practice. McLachlan argues that this shift exposes a wider structural failing:
“We must recognise it as a failing that virtual accessibility was not implemented sooner and that access to the internet is a basic necessity not a luxury.”
Part of the Fleming Collection’s Scottish Art Unlocked series, the piece situates McLachlan’s practice - including her photographic series Mōtae - within a wider call to reconstruct an arts sector shaped by care, adaptability, and equity. As she writes,
“The arts have the capability and a responsibility to be at the forefront of dismantling our old normal into one of a new expectancy.”
