A woman paralysed from the chest down after being hit by a stray bullet in a Hackney shooting has opened her first art exhibition only a few miles from where she was shot.
Natalie Bignell, 35, is unable to pick up a brush or lift it to a canvas so paints by attaching splints to her hands and also uses digital technology powered by her head movements to manipulate images.
A former design student, she needs 24 hour care and had to learn to draw again after the shooting outside a pub in Broadway Market in November 2020 left her in a wheelchair with a C4 spinal cord injury.
Four men were jailed last year for their part in the attack.
Her show at the Nunnery Gallery on Bow Road includes paintings and images of her own medical scans and is the result of almost three years painstaking work that began in her hospital bed at the specialist spinal unit in Stanmore.
She said: “I can’t pick anything up because I don’t have any hand dexterity so I have hand and drawing splints which they made me in Stanmore so it attaches to my arm.
“I draw with tools attached to my arm and I use movement coming from my shoulders,
“I also use a lot of digital ways of drawing as well on Photoshop with Eyegaze technology. It is this little reflector I put in the middle of my eyebrows and then I use my head and its movements.
“It’s been a whole journey of different experiments and facing challenges and figuring out how we’re going to overcome them”.
Natalie, who can only draw on her lap because she can’t lift her arms, recently created an “ambitious” 12-metre-long piece by using her wheelchair to work around the canvas.
She said: “We hired a studio and covered the floor in canvas and I used my wheelchair.
“I manipulated the fabric to begin with by spinning around to create different folds and creases then we’ve made these giant drawing splints.
“I can have my arm facing down so we literally strapped these things made from bamboo and foam and we made different brushes and I used my wheelchair rolling over the fabric to control the line.”
The exhibition, which runs to October 3, includes a documentary about Natalie and how she makes her art as well as five separate pieces of work.
Natalie, who also works part-time as a website analyst, said she wanted to change how people looked at disabled artists.
She said: “There is a serious lack of representation of people with disabilities in the arts and media, from poor accessibility through to institutional ableism. I am strident in my commitment to raising public awareness about paralysis, to platform my own my own experiences of living with a disability, to share my grief, loss, resilience and hope and give insight into how I am reconnecting with my identity and body.”
