1

Collaging an Accessible World:
Building Lady a Playground

By
Emily De Boer
BFA, Emily Carr University of Art + Design

A THESIS SUPPORT PAPER SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE
REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
MASTER OF FINE ARTS
EMILY CARR UNIVERSITY OF ART + DESIGN

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Figure 1 Collaged silkscreen print on paper, 2023, Emily De Boer

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Acknowledgements
To the land,
Thank you, I am beyond grateful to live and play on here. My art practice is situated on
stolen, traditional, and ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh
Úxwumixw (Squamish) and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples. Throughout this document I
discuss my practice of collecting and claiming space. Practices of claiming on stolen land
have a massive potential for catastrophic harm, my process of claiming is one of photography
and pilfering from those I believe are implementing harm on marginalized communities. I
care deeply about the community and streets with which I rebuild into radically inclusive
spaces.
To my community,
Thank you to my cohort. These last eighteen months I have learned to trust my instincts and
indulge in play. I have learned how to take up and alter space. I cannot believe how lucky I
am that I get to learn from, and with, you all.
Thank you to Kai Liu for letting me borrow your electric stapler, your hammer, your tape,
your reach and whatever else I needed.
Thank you to those who listened to my ramblings, those studio visits have changed my life.
Thank you to the crows for reminding me to go home. Thank you to Dolce and Benjamin for
welcoming me once I did.
Thank you to my mom for the endless support. You continue to supply everything I need to
accomplish my dreams.
And thank you to my dad, everything I know about building playgrounds I learnt from you.

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Figure 2 My Childhood playground I built with my dad when I was three.

Figure 3 My dad and I taking a break during its construction.

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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements .......................................................................................................................................3
Table of Contents ..........................................................................................................................................5
List of Figures ...............................................................................................................................................6
Introduction (building a playground for Lady) .........................................................................................7
How My Lived Experiences Help Lady Understand Access ....................................................................9
Material Research Methodology ...............................................................................................................15
Framework (the street as source for worldbuilding) ...............................................................................15
Artistic Method ...........................................................................................................................................21
Chance .........................................................................................................................................................23
Photography (claiming building material) ...............................................................................................25
Collage (a manipulation of structures) .....................................................................................................27
Blocks and Ready-Mades (as anti-architecture) ......................................................................................31
Printmaking (as propaganda)....................................................................................................................40
Installation (as worldbuilding) ..................................................................................................................43
Lady’s Playground, (a reconstructed, accessible world) ..........................................................................45
Looking Forward ........................................................................................................................................47
Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................................49
Bibliography ................................................................................................................................................51

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List of Figures
Figure 1 Collaged silkscreen print on paper, 2023, Emily De Boer .................................... 2
Figure 2 My Childhood playground I built with my dad when I was three. ......................... 4
Figure 3 My dad and I taking a break during its construction. .......................................... 4
Figure 4 Lady on collaged cedar block, 2023, Emily De Boer .......................................... 8
Figure 5 Photograph of access achieved, 2023, Emily De Boer ...................................... 14
Figure 6 Photo of door with Stickers, 2023, Emily De Boer ........................................... 18
Figure 7 Studio wall, 2023, Emily De Boer ................................................................. 22
Figure 8 Studio process shot, 2023, Emily De Boer ...................................................... 22
Figure 9 Photograph documenting chance, 2023, Emily De Boer .................................... 24
Figure 10 Photograph documenting chance, 2023, Emily De Boer .................................. 24
Figure 11 Photograph of wall, 2023, Emily De Boer ..................................................... 25
Figure 12 Photograph of wall, 2023, Emily De Boer..................................................... 25
Figure 13 Photograph of thomasson, 2023, Emily De Boer ............................................ 25
Figure 14 Cut-ups on paper, 2023, Emily De Boer ....................................................... 27
Figure 15 Cut-ups on paper, 2023, Emily De Boer ....................................................... 27
Figure 16 Cut-up on wall, 2023, Emily De Boer .......................................................... 28
Figure 17 Cut-up on paper, 2023, Emily De Boer ......................................................... 29
Figure 18 Look at the Love, 2024, Emily De Boer ....................................................... 30
Figure 19 Cedar blocks with ready-made object, 2023, Emily De Boer ............................ 32
Figure 20 Block City, 2023, Emily De Boer ................................................................ 33
Figure 21 Studio shot of blocks, 2023, Emily De Boer .................................................. 35
Figure 22 Block City Expanded, 2023, Emily De Boer ................................................. 36
Figure 23 Block City Expanded, 2023, Emily De Boer ................................................. 36
Figure 24 Block (detail), 2023, Emily De Boer ............................................................ 37
Figure 25 Block (detail), 2023, Emily De Boer ............................................................ 37
Figure 26 Block (detail), 2023, Emily De Boer ............................................................ 37
Figure 27 Block (detail), 2023, Emily De Boer ............................................................ 37
Figure 28 Lady’s Playground (detail), 2023, Emily De Boer .......................................... 38
Figure 29 Lady’s Playground (installation view), 2023, Emily De Boer ........................... 39
Figure 30 Fenced in, 2023, Emily De Boer ................................................................. 40
Figure 31 Lonely City, 2023, Emily De Boer ............................................................... 40
Figure 32 Bench, 2023, Emily De Boer ...................................................................... 41
Figure 33 Screen prints wheat pasted on wall (Lady’s Playground detail), 2024, Emily De
Boer ..................................................................................................................... 42
Figure 34 Lady's Playground (installation view), 2024 .................................................. 46
Figure 35 Lady's Playground (installation view), 2024, Emily De Boer ........................... 47
Figure 36 Lady's Playground (detail), 2024, Emily De Boer .......................................... 50

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Introduction (building a playground for Lady)

Taking up space is not possible if you cannot access it in the first place. My body has
not been considered in the construction of our world; my practice rejects this discrimination.
With a profound embodied knowledge of exclusionary architecture from the daily navigation
of hostile infrastructure, I have decided to reimagine how space could function when access
and inclusion are prioritized.
Developing strategies that allow me to access spaces that do not consider my body,
my practice is the cathartic processing of this discriminatory exclusion. Through the claiming
of the street and the endlessly ephemeral moments existing in that space, this material is used
in the reimagined construction of the accessible worlds I build within the gallery. Made
accessible through the claiming and manipulation of this material, Lady is able to navigate
these worlds without limitations. Lady, who is my alter ego, travels throughout and has made
a home in each world that I build. She is on a mission to take up space, she would like people
to consider her, she would like to take over.

Research Questions

My work questions the ways in which lived experience can inform an art practice.
Specifically, how does my body, and my fascination with the inaccessibility of the street,
inform how I make space for play and worldbuilding? Like graffiti writers, I am interested in
claiming space in a world of inaccessibility and discrimination.
This is made manifest through experiments with photography, collage, sculpture and
print. How can I draw on my lived experience to create alternate worlds with these collected

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materials? I then ask how these worlds can then be brought together through installations
that further question access by manipulating the institutional space of the gallery.

Figure 4 Lady on collaged cedar block, 2023, Emily De Boer

This thesis project is the construction of a playground for my alter-ego Lady. In this
paper I will describe how I worldbuild using different mediums; how photography, collage,
sculpture, and printmaking are used as tools for worldbuilding 1 installations within the
gallery. I rely on chance and the anonymous collaboration of the street to source my
worldbuilding materials. I have developed a collection of the street that works as source, as
the building materials to use in the construction of new worlds. Through this recording of the
city, I begin to worldbuild a future history, one that speaks to what our environment could be

Worldbuilding defined as the construction of a new, fictional, often idealized place using elements from the
real world.
1

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like: inclusive, caring, decolonized and accessible. Having Lady able to exist in this
imaginary, idealized world allows me to play uninhibited in this potential world. While Lady
roams freely within the installation, viewers are manipulated within the gallery, asking them
to consider their navigation.
Lady is a leitmotiv,2 a character that manifests in different shapes through each
medium and form of my work. Appearing in each world I build, she exists in many forms: she
is a block, a breezeblock motif in print, a ready-made cement breezeblock, and myself in
human form.
Lady, as seen through the writing of this paper, has a mind of her own, the ability to
move throughout space, and can manipulate the movements of others. She is about change
and radical inclusion; she is disappointed in discrimination and how normalized exclusion is.
She just wants to play; she wants to learn and explore and love her community. Lady and I
are one and the same and throughout this paper can be understood as interchangeable.

How My Lived Experiences Help Lady Understand Access
I have an embodied understanding of accessibility because of my lived experience as
a person who uses a wheelchair to navigate my every day. Existing in a body that is often not
considered within the urban landscape, I grapple with this discrimination daily. Since the age
of eleven I have been using a wheelchair to navigate the world around me. Encountering
barriers and arduous environments is an everyday occurrence. I understand the plight caused
by hostile architecture; how this exclusion quickly turns sadness to anger. I am perpetually

2

Leitmotiv is a “dominant or reoccurring theme” defined by Merriam Webster Dictionary here:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/leitmotif

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confused about how the daily execution of this discrimination isn’t more widely understood
as deplorable.
I navigate a city that is hostile towards certain bodies, we all do. It isn’t accessible to
those with disabilities or those without financial means. I see an exponential overhaul of
buildings. They are torn down to be quickly replaced by large boring concrete rectangles. I
mean no offence to the architects, there is only so much you can do when you design for
profit and not humanity. It feels as though it is not dilapidation that necessitates the
demolition, but greed. With gentrification 3 there is the potential for positive change, building
code has the potential to be a rule book for inclusion and yet we are still fighting for ramps
into buildings, accessible washrooms, and housing.
If you are lucky, you will live long enough to experience disability or love someone
who does. People with disabilities are the largest and most intersectional minority group,
“Almost 2.7 million people or 1 in 10 Canadians aged 15 and older had a mobility disability
in 2017, making it one of the most common disability types” 4 and yet accessibility so often
feels like the last priority. I am not an angry person, but I am also not naïve, and this is an
intensely frustrating phenomenon to be constantly enduring. This upheaval makes access to
space all the more precarious. There are solutions to this plight, they just require imaginative
thinking.
When buildings are inaccessible there is a crip erasure at work that mirrors the
building erasure and subsequent exclusion caused by gentrification happening in our cities. I
am rejecting both as they cause detrimental distress for so many bodies. Rooted in activism,

Gentrification is the infiltration of money into a community that then forces that community out. It is the
development of an area desired for its location and cultural value that is then erased through attempts to clean,
modernize, and profit from its desirability. Those that initially resided in these neighborhoods are displaced
creating an even larger housing crisis. A more detailed definition of gentrification can be seen here:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gentrification
4
Stats Canada “A profile of Canadians with a mobility disability and groups designated as visible minorities
with a disability” December 2020. More information can be found here:
https://www.statcan.gc.ca/en/sc/video/profile-canadians-mobility-disability-sign-language
3

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both graffiti and my practice of worldbuilding exemplify this practice of defying erasure.
Shayda Kafai explains that “to create from this activist place results in self-discovery and
love. There is a remaking of the world here, too. Art becomes another medium through which
disabled, queer of colour bodyminds5 can generate new, liberatory pathways on which to
travel”6. It is in this way, graffiti and inclusive, reimagined, disabled worldbuilding is an
appeal to be seen, to defy erasure.
The book Crip Kinship by Shayda Kafai provides an intersectional perspective of
disability justice and activism through art. Published in 2021 it is a current and spectacularly
diverse depiction of very poignant issues within the disabled community. The essay “Art
Making as Evidence”7 among many others in their book has critically validated my lived
experiences as a disabled maker. Describing the experience of being denied access, Kafai
weaves together the nuance of racial, LGBTQIA+, class, and ableist discrimination while also
describing the impact art has had on transcending our bodyminds.
Within disability discourse there is an intense desire for accessibility, obviously, but
the worlds refusal to accommodate us has turned us to our imaginations. Because the ablebodied idea of access is more insistent on curing the disabled body than making
accommodations for everyone and their quirky, confusing, dissonant abilities, we have found
other ways to access space. Creative imagining, dreaming, allows us to build an accessible
world of our own creation: “in dreaming, our communities materialize a world where through
fury and love, transformation in all its rebelliousness thrives” 8.

Bodyminds is a term used within disability discourse to reject the notion that our minds and bodies are
experienced separately. What exists in our imagination is experienced by our bodies, what affects our bodies
informs our knowledge, they are unified.
6
Shayda Kafai Crip Kinship “Introduction” page 17.
7
Shayda Kafai Crip Kinship “Art Making as Evidence” page 87.
8
Shayda Kafai Crip Kinship “Introduction” page 17
5

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This rebellion is what drives my creativity, the observation of others’ and my own. I
am drawn to the everyday9 rebellion of graffiti, the beauty in the random, even the
obstructive; I have “a desire to bring these overlooked aspects of lived experience into
visibility”10 through the cathartic manipulation of them. I am constantly inspired by the
energy and materiality of urban streets; the constant evolution and ephemerality of each
corner has always garnered my adoration. I am fascinated by demonstrations of navigation
and the acquisition of spaces that are increasingly out of reach within the city. Graffiti writers
and I share the desire to take up and claim space, our commitment taking shape in similar but
differing ways. Regardless this “commitment to the everyday… [gives] a voice to those
silenced by dominant discourses and ideologies”11, when we begin to appreciate, question,
and alter what we have grown accustomed to, we begin the see how change is possible.
I have been repeatedly denied access to space in the past, this thesis project is an act
of taking it back and making it mine. Alison Kafer writes in Feminist, Queer, Crip,
“impairments aren't disabling, social and architectural barriers are.” 12 There is nothing wrong
with my body, it is the environment and hostile architecture around it that debilitates
me. Disability can13 be defined as “A disability is any condition of the body or mind
(impairment) that makes it more difficult for the person with the condition to do certain
activities (activity limitation) and interact with the world around them” 14. Within this

The everyday, meaning the seemingly inconsequential details that may not garner the most attention, or be
conventionally attractive, but upon closer inspection can be seen as beautiful.
10
Stephen Johnstone, White Chapel, The Everyday “Introduction // Recent Art and the Everyday” 12
11
Stephen Johnstone, White Chapel, The Everyday “Introduction // Recent Art and the Everyday” 13
12
Alison Kafer, Feminist Queer Crip “Introduction” 7
13
I caution anyone defining a term that is relatively undefinable in its nature. Everyone with a disability will
have their own understanding of disability. This definition is not my own but speaks to my experience being
perceived as a person with a disability.
14
Disability defined by The CDC’s (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention). More information can be
found here:
https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/disabilityandhealth/disability.html#:~:text=A%20disability%20is%20any%20cond
ition,around%20them%20(participation%20restrictions).
9

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definition itself there is blame placed on my body, but I urge you to consider why it is my
body that is the problem and not the infrastructure that was built to exclude me.
I am intrinsically cynical and frightened by those who have the power to change our
world and yet do nothing. In my practice, I have found that through a claiming of the streets
through photography, and the construction of a new composition through collage, I am able to
process and come to terms with the injustices that manifest on the street. As a direct rejection
of this exclusion, I worldbuild crip15-centric liberated zones16.
Negotiating these precarious environments takes careful observation and
consideration of seemingly insignificant and precarious details. When an awkward sidewalk
bump can turn a casual stroll into a projectile happening, small details become crucial to
consider. I have made a practice out of observing the smallest of details and building an
environment out of them. Lady gets to navigate these built environments; she gets to claim
space through her repeated form. In my practice I have started calling attention to who is
being excluded. In a pursuit to take back the city,17 graffiti writers and I share this contempt
for inaccess and actively refuse the rules for acquiring space. We have developed a rebellion,
born from this exclusion, an ill contempt for those in power. Our attitude has shifted about the
way we interact with public space, since the consequences are no worse than the actual
treatment, we no longer fear them.

“Crip” short for cripple, has been reclaimed through the disability rights movement as a way of rejecting the
shame, stereotypes and misconceptions about our abilities perpetuate. Crip typically refers to people with
physical disabilities but through its reclamation has begun to encompass all people with disabilities. For more
information on crip theory see Feminist, Queer, Crip by Alison Kafer.
16
Crip-centric liberated zones are spaces built by intersectional people with disabilities where they “can exist
and thrive liberated from the oppressions that relegate our daily lives”. I will elaborate on how I construct cripcentric liberated zones later in this paper.
17
In Bomb It the graffiti documentary from 2008, a graffiti writer says “we’re not asking for the space, we’re
taking the space” (2:00 https://bombit-themovie.com/) this rebellious claiming is an ethos I share in both the
repeated graffiti bomb-like quality and in my collection of the street that I will describe later in more detail.
15

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Figure 5 Photograph of access achieved, 2023, Emily De Boer

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Material Research Methodology
My research and processes of inquiry looks at the role of collage within art history as
a way of appropriating media to create a new, critical work responding to society. It
investigates the role of installations as sites to consider in relation to one’s body. It explores
the ways in which various mediums offer crucial worldbuilding material in the curation of a
final worldbuilt installation. It investigates the everyday, the politics of space, the hostility of
architecture and the role of collage to reimagine the world, to rebuild an inherently accessible
alternative.
My research methodology follows my artistic method quite closely and tells me where
I should focus my energy. The source of my collages come as a result of my wandering the
city. As a flaneur, someone who wanders the city making, often cynical, observations, I am
perpetually observing the world around me. As a photographer, I capture what I am most
drawn to, what I wish to collect and manipulate into a collage. The diverse media that I work
with is not dissimilar to the diversity of my research. It is similarly eclectic and instinctual. It
is YouTube deep dives, key word searches that take me down internet rabbit holes, physical
books, essays, magazines, and the footnotes within those works that interest, inspire or
influence my work compositionally.

Framework (the street as source for worldbuilding)

The key ideas in my research include worldbuilding with crip theory to build cripcentric liberated zones using the hostile, inaccessible streets as source. This is the framework

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upon which I build my worlds. Without an embodied understanding of debilitating
architecture this thesis project would not exist. Author and disability justice activist Shayda
Kafai’s Crip Kinship describes how access denied requires art activism to create places where
taking up space while disabled is seen as a beautiful, albeit a subversion of what most may
consider beautiful. Understanding that this beauty is subjective I strive to document my
understanding; I believe it is the ephemeral attempts people make in the city to claim space
for themselves. The graffiti tags, stickers, and wheat pasted posters, that are ubiquitous to
every street, in every city, exemplify this claiming. In a city that has made it virtually
impossible to acquire space, people revert to elementary tendencies: it is yours if your name
is on it.
Inherent in each of my collages is the appreciation of the mundane, the non-inherently
beautiful, and the not necessarily appreciated. Each collage element is a minuscule detail
from the city. Disabilities are not seen as admirable, as beautiful, but our lives and the
creative maneuverings that are required to cope with inaccess and discrimination is a refusal
that actively subverts traditional beauty standards. Graffiti is also seen as a subversion of
what people may generally consider beautiful. Rebellion is necessary to question the
structures that uphold these discriminatory beliefs, this oppression.
This subculture is made up of individuals who feel the weight of the constraining
environments around them, those who are disenfranchised by those in power. Those who
want to take up the space they have been systemically excluded from. Style Wars the 1983
documentary18 depicts how it is those who feel disenfranchised turn to graffiti as a way of
claiming space within a city that doesn’t consider them. When you exist in a body where
there are consequences to being seen, negotiating how to survive this hostility breeds
rebellion. BIPOC and disabled people flock to these social circles with the hope of finding

18

The full documentary can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqUwNkr-B3k

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acceptance and solidarity. Being drawn to these subcultures myself, I am finding liberation in
witnessing and capturing the graphic interruptions graffiti writers make on the city.
Investigating the nuances of access requires diligent observation. Tired of strictly considering
where I cannot access, I look to those who have achieved access to the most precarious of
places. Looking at how graffiti writers acquire and maintain the spaces they have claimed
with their tags, I use these marks as motifs of refusal, of access despite restriction, of
claiming space never meant for them. Wanting to engage in this culture myself, I claim their
art and thus the space they’ve acquired by photographing it, collaging it, and building a new,
transformed space with it.
I rely heavily on the aesthetics of the street, struck by anomalies, I am actively
drawing attention to the mundane, to the unnoticed, to the undesirable. Things that may not
conventionally be seen as beautiful, are highlighted. Disability is ubiquitous, and slowly
occurring for everyone, but is not appreciated, and not seen as beautiful. I am actively trying
to subvert this understanding as it is not mine in the slightest and perpetuates harm towards
my community. In creating a world of my own out of these motifs and objects of hostility that
are not traditionally seen as beautiful, I can rebuild an accessible world that is. In rejecting the
architectural structures that exclude, and reimagining the streets I am building crip-centric
liberated zones.

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Figure 6 Photo of door with Stickers, 2023, Emily De Boer

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Those who experience barriers and confront inaccessibility are forced to create
strategies for accessing space, I do this by worldbuilding. Worldbuilding can be defined as
the construction of a new, fictional, often idealized place using elements from the real
world19. Typically related to storytelling, the role of the newly built world is to allow for the
adventure and exploration of a character. This new world and its rules facilitate an escape
from the often-depressing realities of the real world. In building a world out of the remnants
of the places I go I can create a world for Lady to explore without limitations, without any
preconceived notions about what is possible.
Crip Kinship talks about disability justice at large, accounting for everyone,
prioritizing intersectionality over a digestible understanding of disability justice. Providing a
better understanding of disabled experiences, Kafai describes how crip culture views space
creation, how inclusivity is always built in. Creating a world through art making, spaces are
inherently accessible through imagination.
Crip-centric liberated zones, as defined by Sins Invalid an intersectional disability
justice focused performance art project, are spaces of “recognition, validation and healing” 20.
In an alternative way, my collaged worldbuilding are a type of crip-centric liberated zone. In
creating spaces with the intention of access there is a recognition, validation, and healing in
the reconstructed world. Crip-centric liberated zones are spaces built by intersectional people
with disabilities where they “can exist and thrive liberated from the oppressions that relegate
our daily lives”21. They are ephemeral spaces where people are themselves, free to express
themselves, where we can fully affirm the power of our bodyminds 22. Since no space will

For more information on worldbuilding see: https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/what-is-worldbuilding
20
Shayda Kafai Crip Kinship “Creating Crip-Centric Liberated Zones” page 51.
21
Shayda Kafai Crip Kinship “Creating Crip-Centric Liberated Zones” 43.
22
Shayda Kafai Crip Kinship “Creating Crip-Centric Liberated Zones” page 46.
19

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ever be completely accessible to each body present in the space, it is in the intention of
making it accessible, in the care for the experiencer, that makes these spaces revolutionary.
The role Lady plays in these worlds is a direct result of her understanding of
discrimination, her experience being excluded because of her body’s ability, and her rebellion
against those who get to determine who is included and by extension who gets excluded. As it
is widely accepted that not everyone can be included, it is understood that many will be
excluded. The widespread societal acceptance of this disgusts Lady. She is angry that so
many people are satisfied with this status quo and are unwilling to make change. She
understands that change is hard to make, but she also understands that the exclusion of certain
bodies is the direct result of someone else deciding that since you can’t accommodate
everybody it is thus okay to draw the line at disability23, specifically wheelchair users24. This
decision to exclude is just that, a decision, placed upon people with disabilities by people in
power, by those who build the infrastructure we navigate.
Lady is able to navigate this world defying inaccessibility, as inherently there are no
barriers in the new world I have built. The hostility that is built into our urban landscape
makes our cities unnecessarily inhospitable. The inaccessibility of most buildings, the
unnecessary steps, uncovered ramps, sharp textures under overhangs, bars blocking the
middle of benches, and other strategies designed for the restriction of certain bodies in certain
spaces, makes life in the city unnecessarily difficult. Being completely avoidable, this is
infuriating.

The line is absolutely not just drawn at disability. Bodies are disregarded and discriminated against due to
racism and colonization at an incredibly disparate rate. In this paper I am speaking specifically to discrimination
based on one’s physical ability. This exclusion is made much worse when one has intersecting identities that
lead to further marginalization. I am writing from my experience as a disabled, white, cisgender, settler on Turtle
Island.
24
Tanya Titchkosky, The Question of Access Disability, Space, Meaning, page 35.
23

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When the landscape itself is precarious and uncertain, exploration becomes a way of
understanding how to survive. When the stakes of my rebuilt world are not nearly as
tumultuous as the real one, a liberated sense of exploration is possible. In understanding that
the impulse to change, to remake comes from a dissatisfaction with the rampant inaccessible
infrastructure no one seems willing to alter, it is understandable my collaged compositions
have no structure but balance, this flimsy ground understood by only those accustomed to this
instability. In rejecting the architectural rules that dictates, plans, and implements hostility
towards certain bodies 25, I have found other ways to build a world where access is attainable,
where inaccess is questioned.

Artistic Method
My artistic method is one of perpetual creativity in the studio and out, it begins with
observation and ends with a never-ending experimentation. My observations are collected
through photography and the acquisition of physical ready-mades whilst navigating. I use
photography as a claiming, a collection, documenting the infrastructure and chance
encounters I am continuously witnessing as I move within the city. Alongside my
photography I collect found materials from the urban environment. In the studio I undertake
the organizing of my found and photographic visual vernacular of the streets. I consider the
construction of this collection the development of a personal, often anonymous, archive26 of
my experience navigating streets. I work through the material I have collected to combine

To read more about Vancouver’s hostility towards houseless people see:
https://www.vancouverisawesome.com/courier-archive/news/vancouvers-defensive-architecture-is-hostile-tohomeless-say-critics-3102287
26
The development of this thesis project tangentially cultivated a personal archive of the streets I navigate. I am
invested in decolonial archival practices, my research now questioning what it means to collect material for a
self-indulgent practice while on stolen land.
25

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elements of photography, collage, sculpture, printmaking, and installation to build a new
world where access is inherent to each tangible collage, where composition and precarity
dictate the structure.

Figure 8 Studio process shot, 2023, Emily De Boer

Figure 7 Studio wall, 2023, Emily De Boer

My artistic method is primarily governed by the “compositional notion of play”27
collage artist Helina Metaferia describes, and Stephen Nachmanovitch discusses further in
Free Play: Improvisation in Art and Life28. He likens compulsive creative exploration to
childlike wonder, unencumbered by judgement, freely exploring without consequence and
criticism. He likens the studio to a recklessly propagating nature, creating so rapidly the
waste is not seen as waste but as attempts at something better. When intuition,
experimentation and play are at work in practice you end up creating work that looks and
feels like the artist. The compulsive experimentation he describes is how my practice evolves.

Artist Helina Metaferia describes her creative process and collage techniques in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUOMhVwnQ98&t=682s
28
Stephen Nachmanovitch Free Play: Improvisation in Art and Life
27

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Play, interruption and this sense of trial and error are central in my artistic process and
installation practices. Nachmanovitch’s discussion of process reflects my own artistic method.
I am compelled to create something, to apply my playful yet labour-intensive processes to my
strategies of worldbuilding and start the process again.

Chance

I rely on chance and the anonymous collaboration of others on the street in the
development of my building material collection. I am constantly navigating the balance
between chance and control. I rely on chance, to observe something unexpected, to capture it
through photography, to collect ready-mades, to respond to gallery spaces. The anticipation
of a moment, and the subsequent decisive moment29 Henri Cartier Bresson describes, relies
on my compulsive observation of the street, my compositional intuition, and the collaboration
of each form to capture the “proper expression”30 of that space.
I am open to chance observations and use the Situationists concept of the Derive31 to
explore my cities environment in a way that recognizes the inherent community and personal
connection to the infrastructure whilst I collect material. Because of chance, the potential for
new connections, compositions, and spectacles32 as the Situationists describe, are endless.
Chance as described by flaneur photographer Richard Wentworth is the “almost literalizing

Henri Cartier Bresson “The Decisive Moment”
Henri Cartier Bresson “The Decisive Moment” page 30
31
For an expanded explanation of the Situationist movement see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGJr08NauM
32
Spectacle, as described by the Situationists “is a worldview that has actually been materialized” (Debord 7)
Debord, Guy (2004 [1967]) The Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Ken Knabb. London: Rebel Press.
Available online: http://rebels-library.org/files/socie...
29
30

24
[of] the coincident,”33 the documentation of the spontaneous event within the confines of
control. The clicking of my cameras capture, the availability of a ready-made and the
decision to claim is the extent of my control over my collection. The rest is up to the
collaboration of those on the street before me and the possibility of what the lens or my hands
might capture at that particular moment.

Figure 9 Photograph documenting chance, 2023, Emily De Boer

33

Richard Wentworth Making Do and Getting By page 14.

Figure 10 Photograph documenting chance, 2023, Emily De
Boer

25

Photography (claiming building material)
Photography is where my playful, compulsive creativity begins. Photographs are
source for my collages, and in taking the pictures myself I am able to control, while relying
on chance, what I will later collage. Photography allows “the agency of chance to bring about
the unexpected”34. The aesthetics documented are those that do not necessarily get
highlighted, these as accidental, more organic, everyday aesthetics that occur when someone
intervenes on a space. I take photographs of urban motifs like, business facades, graffiti,
homes, doors, fences, dumpsters, and signage, stairs, roadblocks, and thomassons 35, these
compositions are documented, cut-up and collaged to compose a new place.

Figure 11 Photograph of wall, 2023,
Emily De Boer

Figure 13 Photograph of thomasson,
2023, Emily De Boer

Figure 12 Photograph of wall, 2023,
Emily De Boer

White Chapel Chance, The Aesthetics of Chance, Iversen, page 23
An architectural element that has been preserved yet serves no function. They are now understood as
conceptual art. https://www.messynessychic.com/2017/01/18/the-inexplicably-fascinating-secret-world-ofthomassons/
34
35

26
Movement and the chance of documentation are integral aspects of my work, they are
also for collector and artist Bobby Puleo 36. Puleo collects garbage from New York’s streets,
the abundance he collects is then organized into groups of nine of the same objects 37. He is
drawn to packaging, lighters, nail clippers and other obscure littered anomalies he finds on
the street. We share the same impulse to collect mundane elements from the street that
capture our attention, filter these collections, and create something out of this abundance.
This urge to collect before it is gone and the burden of feeling as though you are responsible
for capturing it before its inevitable destruction is something we must grapple with. It is an
exciting, powerful, impulse, to decide what is recorded, to worldbuild a future history.
Travelling across cities I document their streets, the unique, dilapidated businesses
and homes being slated for demolition and the anonymous, to most, graffiti tags that adorn
these structures within the city. My photographs are not beholden to rigid requirements but
instead rely heavily on chance and my perspective to capture an ideal composition. In a
similar way to my photographs, Puleo is making the same impulsive decisions about what to
collect and what to leave behind. These collections and the decisions involved in their capture
are integral to the outcome of the work.
Bobby Puleo and I rely on chance to build typographies of our cities. I am interested
in his shared desire to collect the undesirable, the disappearing. Our nature to compulsively
commitment our subject allows for an abundance that is necessary for a comprehensive
foundation for worldbuilding. Relying on chance to depict our worlds, it is crucial we are
constantly observing and collecting, as these chance anomalies make for surprises that later
become integral to the rebuilt world.

36

A London Mudlark meets a New York StreetLark - The Streets of New York City are Bobby Puleo's River

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdmcdVVoJRk&t=29s
37
See his compositions here: https://www.instagram.com/gutter_gallery/?hl=en

27

Collage (a manipulation of structures)
The history of collage as medium further validates why I am drawn to the medium.
Rooted in a critique of the status quo, collage is a medium intrinsically involved in the
critique of the everyday, a questioning of the mainstream, an appropriation and destruction of
the mass produced. Inherent in the medium is a dissatisfaction with the world and the desire
to reconstruct: “photomontage creates from totally disparate elements a new unity which
reveals a conceptually new image of the chaos of an age of war and revolution” 38. Collage
cuts up the found everyday material, and thus the politics of society, and builds anew from it.

Figure 14 Cut-ups on paper, 2023, Emily De Boer

Figure 15 Cut-ups on paper, 2023, Emily De Boer

Photographs, while they tell a story themselves as individual shots, once combined
and altered, create something new, something surreal. Inherent to the medium is a desire for
change. Collage is a surreal construction of different places, times, and media, it is a
rebuilding of the world. Grounded in the ethos of Dada, there is an inherent criticism of

Dada and Surrealism: Europe After the Rain documentary (1978) (16:35-16:47)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdBaS8fgwNs&t=2071s
38

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society in the medium of collage, a rejection of societal norms and the preciousness that is
typical of traditional art making. Lisa Wainwright, Art Historian, describes the politics of
Dada in her lesson on Surrealism “German Dada and Collage” 39 Wainwright says dada
prefers “ephemeral” materials like paper to make posters that speak to this mundane,
nonhierarchical, unpolitical - and so politicized - mediums. Hannah Höch takes the mundane
images from everyday magazines, cuts them up and recontextualizes them into a new, jarring
environment for viewers. By its nature, collage pilfers from ready-mades, found objects and
media at large to build an alternative, potentially more inclusive, world.

Figure 16 Cut-up on wall, 2023, Emily De Boer

See the full video of Lisa Wainwright’s lesson “German Dada and Collage here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyESqX84jRg
39

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I print out my photographs onto cardstock paper and cut them up intricately with a
utility knife. My photographs are used as source for a similar process to Höch’s of
recontextualizing and reconstruction of environments from collected material. I extract the
content from the background further separating content, patterns, text, and other collage
elements from the photograph. The objects within the photographs become tangible to me
through this cutting. In this way I am able to access everything within, making the world
accessible to be and jarring to others. There is a care-free sense of play in my decision
making when I cut and combine shapes together. This same play relies on intuition in
organizing the cut-ups, this play succumbs to chance, and teaches me about my composition
sensibilities.

Figure 17 Cut-up on paper, 2023, Emily De Boer

30
The collage artist Jennifer Williams and I share a similar visual language and
processes of making. Using our own photographs as sources for our collages, it is clear we
are drawn to the city motifs that surround us. Williams has begun to organize her photographs
into manipulated series’, be they digitally cut up, enlarged, cropped, regardless, they are
collaged and displayed as objects removed from their original context. Williams and I are
both drawn to colour, composition and the collection of a type, however we have a differing
aesthetic sensibility despite being drawn to similar imagery and medium. She has a more
maximalist approach to her final compositions whereas my collages only become complex
through the accumulation of many installed together.

Figure 18 Look at the Love, 2024, Emily De Boer

31
In a series called The Decorated Shed: East Village & Lower East Side 40 she
documents and then cuts out the restaurant vestibules from their original context. When
Williams crops out all the information around the vestibule, decontextualizing the structure,
she tells her viewers exactly what to look at. The shape of the structures, the sheer variety, the
art on them, the patterns that adorn the edges, the materials that make the structures, the
colours themselves, they are all used to illude a two-dimensional, flat composition of a
building’s facade.
These permanently impermanent constructions are littered with graffiti and graffiti
appears where space is easily accumulated for some and not others. These temporary
vestibule structures were designed to allow for profit when COVID 19 lockdown
circumstances made this difficult. In states of financial vulnerability, businesses took to the
claiming of space to maintain success. The ability or inability to claim space directly
correlating to one’s success. Through the collage and manipulation of each individual cut-out
I have made the city tangible to me. In collaging these sites and building a world out of them
I have gained access to that place and built a new one to navigate without limitations.

Blocks and Ready-Mades (as anti-architecture)

Referencing anti-architecture41, and thus anti-inaccessibility, with my collages, I
wanted my work to physically influence the space around it. I began making the printed, flat,
photographs an object again. Folding the paper into cubes, building Block City (fig. 20) I built

See East Village 21, 2023, Jennifer Williams here: https://jennifer-williams.com/section/525466The%20Decorated%20Shed%20-%20East%20Village%20and%20Lower%20East%20Side.html
41
The Superstudio, an anti-architecture art collective, popularized the experimentation of radically accessible
spaces. For more information see: https://www.archdaily.com/951925/the-return-of-superstudio-and-the-antiarchitecture-ideology.
40

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my first anti-architecture structure. I quickly realized I needed to solidify them so that they
could interact with physical objects and influence space more substantially. Gluing the paper
to cubed, cedar blocks I was able to build more complex sculptures through the placement of
the blocks underneath heavy ready-mades (fig. 19). I collect readymade objects that I stumble
upon to use as alternative methods of display. And as structures within the installations to
manipulate one’s navigation of the space.

Figure 19 Cedar blocks with ready-made object, 2023, Emily De Boer

33

Figure 20 Block City, 2023, Emily De Boer

34

I turn the cut-ups and collaged compositions into three dimensional collages by
adhering them to wooden blocks. The six faces of the blocks themselves are made up of
formal collages that rely on balance, juxtaposition and often text to create a scene. As
individual blocks they feel like characters or landmarks, but they are objects to be played
with, to structurally influence space, to juxtapose against the real world as a glitched or
pixelated remnant of somewhere, to be installed amongst each other to create a world.
These collaged blocks are made cut-out pieces from the photographs I have taken, an
eclectic blend of material collected over time, elements like cartoon comic books, artificial
grass, caution tape, nails, and anything else found amusing. Each one is a place stripped of its
original context, brought into a sculptural space so they can exist in a new realm. These
fragments of cities are recombined to create a place that defies the conventions of architecture
and thus the conventions of a city that plans its discrimination.
Lady is seen travelling throughout this installation multiple forms, as her original form
of the miniature hot pink block (fig. 21), and in print form as the breezeblock motif. Attaining
access to each cut-out, through the process of claiming and further through cutting it out,
Lady is able to access these spaces through her repeated representation and the physical
movement of the pink block over the course of the installation.

35

Figure 21 Studio shot of blocks, 2023, Emily De Boer

In Block City Expanded (fig. 22 and 23) the wall and the plinth are rejected, instead
using found boxes to lift and juxtapose the collaged blocks. Referencing architecture through
a display of anti-architecture, the blocks reject a structure in their precarity, balanced atop
each other. In pushing the obscurity of the blocks’ arrangement there is a direct rejection of
uniform, structured design that follow the rules made by those in power. Those who enforce
hostile architecture and inaccessibility. In rejecting the architectural structures, they dictate

36
appropriate for the city, how exclusionary these are for some bodies, the work is also
rejecting the systematized hierarchy of bodies this infrastructure perpetuates. When the
exclusion and divide of certain bodies is planned out and purposeful, there are departments in
each city to uphold this oppression, it is necessary to make work that directly opposes these
structures.

Figure 23 Block City Expanded, 2023, Emily De Boer

Figure 22 Block City Expanded, 2023, Emily De Boer

As the size of the blocks expand, the collages become smaller and more central in the
cube as the cubes enlarge while the cut-outs remain the same size. The minimal collages are
most often composed in the centre of a square, on a white piece of paper, then nailed in all
four corners to a wooden block. These collages are meticulously cut out, precise, and starkly
juxtaposed against another collaged element. Taking urban motifs and removing them from
their original, recognizable, context further distorts reality. Viewers have a distorted
understanding of the place; viewers are asked to question the system that dictates the
structure of the blocks themselves.

37

Figure 27 Block (detail), 2023, Emily De Boer

Figure 26 Block (detail), 2023, Emily De Boer

Figure 24 Block (detail), 2023, Emily De Boer

Figure 25 Block (detail), 2023, Emily De Boer

38
The collaged blocks can exist in many forms. On their own, balanced atop each other,
or on the wall. In Lady’s Playground, (fig. 28) they existed on the wall. Perpendicular to the
blocks on the wall there was a tree branch screwed to the wall, a pinecone adorning the
extended branch and a long strand of hot pink construction flagging tape gesturing across the
entire installation space, grounded in the gallery space with another assemblage of wood, a
zap strap, and a nail placed precariously at the bottom of the column across from the blocks.
This pink flagging tape worked as a barrier within the installation that those experiencing the
work must contend with when navigating the space. This impulse to create spaces that force
the viewer to move around the space and seek alternative perspectives of the work is one I
continued to explore in my final thesis exhibition.

Figure 28 Lady’s Playground (detail), 2023, Emily De Boer

39
In rejecting the wall and the plinth as presentation devices I have had to find
alternatives for presenting the work. Found and manufactured objects have become plinths
and structures for the work to rest, for example: pylons, signs, boxes, plywood boards or a
bus bench backrest. These containers come with their own connotations as the objects
themselves are charged with meaning. The bus Bench (fig. 33) in particular, typically housing
advertisements for the real estate industry, is quite decontextualized when it is turned on its
side, the ad within it flipped over and filled with altered, repeating collaged, prints that
resemble stickers slapped onto the surface. The aesthetics and ethos of this practice rely
heavily on graffiti. Intrinsically drawn to the autonomous and relentless pursuit of tagging
one’s way through a place, I instead relentlessly collect from the city with a similar
aggression.

Figure 29 Lady’s Playground (installation view), 2023, Emily De Boer

40

Figure 30 Fenced in, 2023, Emily De Boer

Figure 31 Lonely City, 2023, Emily De Boer

Collecting the ready-mades that become plinths (fig. 30 and fig. 31) and containers
(fig. 32) for the work is heavily reliant on chance and the assistance of others. Drawn to
objects that are charged with meaning, I enjoy the juxtaposition of those objects within the
gallery as the foundation for my worlds. The desire to take objects from the city that
debilitates my movement has come from a sense of spite. I have managed to attain objects
that are literal barriers, flipping them upside down and building worlds on top of them, I am
uprooting their authority and manipulating their purpose for my own.

Printmaking (as propaganda)
I consider the influence of ideas, spread to a population, a sort of worldbuilding.
Posters have historically been used to influence the public, to spread news and awareness to a
community, now used as advertising, our public space has been coopted by corporations to

41
influence us. What surrounds us, influences us. Inserting my repeated, reimagined, everyday
imagery back into the street I can break up the current capitalistic propaganda for my own:
the expansion of Lady’s Playground.

Figure 32 Bench, 2023, Emily De Boer

Because of my desire, and Lady’s ability, to claim space through the spreading and
accumulation of my work within space, I required another medium to help me achieve this
claiming. Printmaking’s laborious process, and my unwillingness to register the prints42,
came from a desire to take up more space without having to give up the creation of each
individual piece. I am drawn to processes that require diligent planning and preparation and

Robert Rauschenberg also constantly improvised in his screen-printing process, not registering his prints,
never creating two works alike.
42

42
yet succumb to chance. The arduous labor that goes into creating something that appears
simple and easy has always appealed to me. So much goes into the planning and adapting of
navigation when you have a disability, it takes a lot of work to make it look easy.

Figure 33 Screen prints wheat pasted on wall (Lady’s Playground detail), 2024, Emily De Boer

Lady is a reoccurring motif within the prints as a single breezeblock. Her repeated
motif claiming each surface she travels to. This worldbuilding through a repeated character
installed within a space resembles Fafi, a graffiti writer and her character Fafinette. Originally
from Toulouse, France she grew up with an interest in the transformation of paintings to

43
architecture. Painting a sexy, character dressed in pink repeatedly throughout the city she
noticed the world she was creating through her installations. Painting new characters for her
world that is ever expanding, she is creating a universe people can insert themselves into,
where they can see the joy in its construction 43.
The use of repeated motifs to claim space is not a new idea. Graffiti writers write their
name on everything as a way of claiming space and becoming seen. Printmaking allows me
to use my cut-outs to create screen-printed collages that share repeated motifs while each
being completely original. In putting these prints out in the real world, I am building an
environment and installing it on the street.

Installation (as worldbuilding)
These building materials once collected are used to build a world within the gallery.
The various scales, mediums, and processes of installation I utilize require the viewer to
consider different perspectives. My work, due to its small scale demands a close inspection of
the work, demands they alter their body to the space, and consider their navigation. This
strategic manipulation has become another place to play in my practice. My installations are
installed by myself, most often, and reject traditional display heights. They are hung low on
the walls, on the floor, composed in the center of the space, or on a structure not typically
reserved for art installations. This is out of the same desire for independence and access that
has inspired this practice. There are certain desires though that I cannot accomplish without
help. With the need for help comes the lack of control, as accounting for chance has become a

Status Magazine ‘Daydream delight Fafi reveals her world of fafinettes and Fantasy”
pg. 85 https://issuu.com/statusmagonline/docs/status7
43

44
crucial part in my practice, I have had to come to terms with this. To mitigate a lack of
control, and achieve my desired composition, I plan extensively the development of my
installation.
The impulse to manipulate space, take up space and demand people consider the
space they are in is one Mona Hatoum and I share. Hatoum understands how hostile
architectural environments can be for some bodies. I appreciate how her installations, as large
interventions in space, aim to make people consider their body’s relation to the space and the
objects within it, similarly to my final installation (fig. 34). A Palestinian living in Lebanon,
she is aware of that struggle with barriers, borders and negotiating access to places that
should already account for her. She uses ready-mades and modified ready-mades to create
sculptures and installations that inspire the same sense of unease she has experienced her
entire life due to the occupation of Palestine. Her identity has been weaponized against her. I
am interested in how she has used this understanding of access to create work that asks
people to consider a different perspective, hers.
The ready-mades she uses have built-in connotations, she then directly juxtaposes
them with her manipulation of the object or material. Impenetrable, 200944 perfectly
illustrates this juxtaposition. It looks clean and stark, but upon closer inspection you see it’s
just the opposite, sharp, unsuspecting, and potentially dangerous if one were to attempt entry.
With Impenetrable Hatoum has created a space where initially you are bombarded by the
composition of the space, finding solace in the symmetry, the intense contrast of black metal
floating in the white space, gently swaying from the movement of bodies. Large nine-footlong metal strands hang in uniform rows from fishing line to form a floating cube in the
center of the gallery space. Made up of 441 strands of barbed wire it is both delicate and
threatening. The piece oscillates between these two often polarized characterizations,

44

See Mona Hatoum’s Impenetrable, 2009 here: https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/30304

45
destabilizing the environment. This cognitive dissonance makes viewers question the ground
they walk on.
Inspired by Hatoum’s work, I wish to make people consider how they are navigating
space, I purposefully interrupt the viewers understanding of how they navigate the objects
installed. By taking urban, street ready-mades and creating these composed barriers we are
making those experiencing our work consider the space they are in and how to navigate it.
The precarity of my blocks and the charged connotations of the ready-mades I use in my
installations imply a similar harm. In building these worlds, I am asking the viewer to care for
the space as they’d wish to be cared for. I am fascinated by how she is able to create such
strong statements about access, refusal, and the harm of being somewhere that doesn’t
account for you. Access is precarious if you were meant to be denied, when the space was
designed to exclude you. I create spaces where inclusion is built in, where access is inherent
to each installed world.

Lady’s Playground, (a reconstructed, accessible world)
The entirety of this program has been the development of this final installation. The
plywood ready-mades, found through chance, have cut-outs and silkscreen prints wheat
pasted onto each panel. They are then hung on the wall, changing their context from the street
to the gallery. The cedar trees act as a soft barrier obscuring the entrance to the space. The
silkscreen prints are postered throughout the gallery space on tall columns that force viewers
to consider how I have installed them (fig. 35). Throughout the development of my final
thesis exhibition, I was asking how I could build a space within the gallery that forces the
viewer to consider their navigation of the space. I began this process by asking how I would

46
respond to the gallery space. I knew that I wanted to build a place the viewer would have to
negotiate their movements around, where wayfinding requires more consideration than
typically necessary within the gallery.

Figure 34 Lady's Playground (installation view), 2024

Despite the gentle barrier the cedar trees present, the installed world is inherently
accessible. Made that way through the collection of objects, the manipulation of them and the
community that aided its installation. The collaboration intrinsic to this work has inspired a
deeper investigation of chance. Specifically making me question how I can rely on it so
significantly while maintaining my autonomy.
This thesis project brought together my many strategies of worldbuilding, using
collage, printmaking, and ready-made objects, I constructed a reimagined world within the

47
gallery. Collaborating with my community through chance scenarios, I have reclaimed my
city through the compulsive capture of decisive moments.

Figure 35 Lady's Playground (installation view), 2024, Emily De Boer

Looking Forward
My research is deeply personal, coming from an embodied understanding of
inaccessibility and the discrimination I face due to the way my body is perceived, it is
profoundly vulnerable to discuss and present the ways in which I am not accounted for. What
surprised me about this installation was the overwhelming outpouring of love I received after
presenting my thesis and displaying Lady’s Playground, 2024 (fig. 34 and fig. 35). Presenting

48
work that is so personal and finding that others not only appreciate the work but find their
own solace in it has changed my life. I will continue to build spaces that call out and refuse
discrimination. I will continue to build spaces where care and community are integral to their
construction.
My research inquiries are now heavily invested in the notion of collaboration, what is
reappropriate-able? What makes public space - and the motifs that adorn it - worthy of
archiving and reimagining? What about these ephemeral moments and the cultural value they
carry, makes these messages worthy of archiving, worthy of memorializing, worthy of
reimagining? And finally, how can I continue my practice of worldbuilding outside of the
gallery, reinserting my constructions into the streets they originated from?
What I make next will continue to balance chance and control. It will still be about the
street, about the construction of accessible spaces, about the manipulation of my collected
building materials. With the street as my source, I have an endless stream of inspiration at my
disposal. Using a fixed lens camera, I will continue to explore street photography using the
control of a 40mm lens and my seated perspective. Documenting my perspective of the street,
I will expand my archive of the street and thus my content available for worldbuilding.
The development of this thesis project allowed me to explore mediums I had never
before experimented with. My next project will incorporate the mediums I began
experimenting with but never fully explored, linocut printmaking in particular. The creation
of this large installation inspired a similar project that would allow me to build a house out of
my collected materials. I will carve my cut-ups into lino, printing these onto shingle shaped
paper that will then side the structure. I want to build a home for Lady, one where care and
community are integral to the structure. Lady has made a home in the center of this
playground I built for her (fig. 34).

49
I am looking forward to the evolution of my practice, it is a rapidly evolving,
constantly adapting process of creativity. I am never without an idea, I will continue to
collect, build, and cultivate a community that inspires this compulsive creativity as it is
integral to who I am as an artist. I cannot stop moving, cannot stop making, and cannot stop
responding to the world around me.

Conclusion
My work is the claiming and construction of accessible, considerate spaces for all
bodies. These constructed installations become crip-centric liberated zones as they recognize,
validate, and heal the harm caused by exclusion. By collaging images and objects from the
street together within the gallery, I am questioning the way architecture manipulates certain
bodies. By creating installations that point to this manipulation, I am asking viewers to
consider how their body is able to access my worlds.
My practice has evolved from the curation of composition to the curation of chance.
My role as artist is to respond, respond to my observations, to the printed photograph, to the
cut-outs, to the gallery. In curating a response, I am able to choose what is being represented,
whose voices are being lifted, what messages are being spread, while calling attention to who
is being excluded, who is being asked to consider their body, their biases. Neutrality is
dangerous, I want people to question what their idea of neutral space feels like. I want the
viewer to notice who is excluded in the spaces they experience daily. Just because hostile
space is normalized does not mean that an alternative, accessible space is not possible.

50

Figure 36 Lady's Playground (detail), 2024, Emily De Boer

51

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“A London Mudlark Meets a New York Streetlark - the Streets of New York City Are Bobby
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