The Disability Arts and...Podcast
The Disability and…Towards New Worlds
with Joanne Coates and Louise McLachlan
Disability Arts Online Podcast | 2025
Reflections on practice, access, and reclaiming the body through photography
Towards New Worlds is a groundbreaking exhibition bringing together work by disabled, d/Deaf and neurodivergent artists, originally shown at MIMA (Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art) from July 2024 to February 2025. Co-curated by Aidan Moesby and Helen Welford, the exhibition explores how artists experience, sense and navigate the contemporary world, foregrounding diverse perceptions, internal worlds and embodied ways of knowing.
McLachlan’s work is included in both the physical exhibition and its digital iteration, Towards New Worlds Digital, now live on Disability Arts Online’s new platform dis_place until December 2025.
Photography as access and agency
McLachlan describes herself first and foremost as “a disabled artist who works with photography,” emphasising photography as “the most accessible tool for me to create.” For her, the medium’s long history of documenting life and bodies makes it a powerful site for questioning representation, authorship and control:
“Photography allows people to have control of how they are seen and documented and placed within history.”
This question of control is central to Mōtae, an ongoing body of work shown in the exhibition. Created over several years, Mōtae emerged during a period of severe illness and loss of bodily autonomy. Rather than documenting disability in a literal or explanatory way, the work focuses on reclaiming authorship over the body and its image.
Mōtae: abstraction, movement and reclaiming the body
The works in Mōtae are created through a layered process. McLachlan paints abstract canvases, then photographs her own reflection within them, producing images that sit between painting and photography. The resulting photographs are fluid, gestural and deliberately ambiguous.
“I was trying to create the new within the familiar… I couldn’t really change where I was, but I could change the way in which I created artwork.”
The title Mōtae refers to motion, and movement is a recurring presence in the work - sometimes frustrated, sometimes calm, sometimes fleeting. Faces and eyes are largely absent, resisting the instinct to read the body through expression or diagnosis:
“As soon as you put eyes and faces in a photograph, we scan them. Removing that allowed the body to become more sculptural, more abstract - and it gave me privacy.”
This abstraction allows the work to operate on multiple levels: as an exploration of form and colour, as an archive of lived time, and as a quiet resistance to reductive narratives around disabled bodies.
Shifting identity, evolving narratives
When McLachlan first began making Mōtae, she did not identify as Disabled. That shift came later, shaped by chronic illness, shielding during the COVID-19 lockdowns, and engagement with disability history and the social model of disability.
“I realised I was never going to be separate from this. Disability was always going to affect my life.”
Rather than changing her practice, this shift reframed it. The meaning of the work evolved as her understanding of disability evolved:
“The narrative of a photograph inevitably changes over time. Having my body in the work allowed it to keep evolving.”
This long relationship with the work reflects the importance of time - not only in photography, but in how Disabled artists are able to develop, reflect and grow outside of productivity-driven expectations.
Towards New Worlds: care, access and trust
McLachlan describes her experience of working with MIMA and the curators as “a real gift.” Flexible communication, shared decision-making and attention to access needs created a process that was genuinely artist-led:
“It felt like making it work for you, rather than you having to make yourself fit the institution.”
The exhibition itself creates space for rest, reflection and varied sensory engagement, recognising access as a creative condition rather than an afterthought.
Beyond the gallery
Since Towards New Worlds, McLachlan continues to develop projects centred on disability history, photography and alternative education, including work with archives in Craigmillar, Edinburgh, and co-founding the event series ‘Where Are the Disabled Photographers?’ - a platform for disabled photographers to share work, build community and challenge exclusion within the field.
“Art is an essential tool for dismantling stigma - but also for showing the value of Disabled lives, Disabled histories and Disabled ways of working.”
Image description:
A graphic poster promoting The Disability and… Podcast by Disability Arts Online. The background is dark teal with a tilted yellow rectangular panel in the centre reading: “Disability and… Towards New Worlds with Joanne Coates and Louise Mclachlan.” At the top, white text reads: “Disability Arts Online presents The Disability and… Podcast.” At the bottom left is a cut-out black-and-white photograph of Louise Mclachlan operating a camera on a tripod with one arm raised, outlined in yellow. At the bottom right is a cut-out black-and-white photograph of Joanne Coates, smiling with her arms folded, also outlined in yellow.
