When I wrote my artist statement for 'Exposed' all those years ago, I had come from the Disability Arts scene, political, radical, sometimes almost separatist, and I coated myself in a layer of anger. It was a good time, where I was allowed to develop my skills in a supportive, understanding and invigorating way, within the safe confines of like-minded and politically Disabled people, but it also meant that when I came into more mainstream, i.e., non-disabled, arts, I was defensive in my refusal to be labelled by traditionally disablist cultural understanding, and therefore spiky, sometimes obstreperous. Although it gave me the energy and focus to create a lot of my early work, I also sometimes missed my mark, or rather, failed to get the optimum interface with my intended audience/s. However, this was for me better than suffering and continuing to be a passive victim of the misunderstanding of what was then an almost 100 per cent non-disabled arts scene, a time where most disabled artists were just considered to be doing their own therapy rather than it being seen as valid art, and indeed one where many non-disabled artists, looking for shock, had found disability as one of the last taboos to use. In their often surface level use of this imagery we, Disability Artists, sometimes felt, for right or for wrong, that they were hijacking some of what we thought of as our territory, which was one of the reasons I actually entered into the fray of mainstream arts, to begin to put a more authoritative stamp on work around disability imaging and discussions. To the credit of Lois Keidan & the Live Art Development Agency, Manuel Vason, Marisa Carnesky, Laura Godfrey Isaacs and notable others, I was offered a space to be, to further discover my own work practices, and even begin to flourish in the Live Art scene of London's early Noughties. My practice has often been to use my own body as an intervention in Society's misconceived and clichéd perceptions of Disability, especially of the identity imaging of Disability. Paul Darke said, and I agree, that media imaging of disability is the sole defining cultural aspect that shapes people's perceptions of Disabled people. This media imaging habitually uses disabled people as a warning, for pity inducing, for scare tactics, for sympathy, for schadenfreude, and in general for othering, and rendering us the eternal outsider. Thus, my art has historically and continues to deal with my body in a reactive way against Society's negative labelling of it and actively invites a confrontation of perceptions of it, and of me, in order to shake out of complacency the viewer's expectations and so set up an inner confrontation for the audience, that they may reconsider the positioning. Sometimes seeming to collude with and further propagate stereotypes, whilst simultaneously provoking the audience to question those stereotypes, and sometimes encouraging people to rethink their own stereotyped attitudes by coercion, reasoning, argument and increasingly comedic aspects. In terms of form, I am certainly a performing artist. My work veers heavily towards the theatrical and heightened reality of performance in settings that become the theatre space. From intimate faux dinner parties performed in 'Home', an actual domestic house, to a tour coach used for an architecturally based onslaught against disablist cultural values masquerading as an architectural tour, to a side room in a Town Hall pitching as an information booth, as well as a myriad of theatre, performance spaces, museums, and of course the World at large in invisible theatre. One of the more contentious and provocative performance spaces that I have developed my work in is the Side show or Freak show. In Coney Island's 'Sideshows by the Seashore', the last and only permanent sideshow in the United States, I have explored and created my work, all the while being a working natural born freak in the shows, whilst simultaneously developing an understanding and practice that comments on contemporary culture from the stance of a re-imagining of the Freak as a cultural commodity, as a disabled and disabling identity. When I started this work in 2000, I was the only congenitally deformed performer working there, and it was still considered by the so called knowledgeable, to be 'the pornography of the disabled'. Now, thirteen years later, many disabled people are coming to this art form as a way of expressing themselves in a performance arena that doesn't judge them automatically as lesser, other, and invalidated, but that pays them, gives them a platform on which to express themselves, and encourages exploration of their self identity. Indeed, a new phrase has emerged to describe freak shows' relationship to disabled people, 'The new rock'n'roll'. Fraught with complications as it is, it is a refreshing alternative to liberal funded, box ticking confined Disability Arts work. In developing my multi-identity/ies through this process, I've been able to carve out an equalized persona in the New York cabaret and Burlesque scene where I continue to perform, intervene and force reconsideration on a nightly basis with audiences who would never knowingly come to see what they might perceive as Disability Arts. In this way I am continuing my practice of intervention into the cultural clichéd misconceptions that continue to render us the eternal 'other', generally in historically non-disabled environments. I call this 'Cripping up the scene' and it is something I am always looking to do in new and hitherto undiscovered arenas. The last bastion of refusal to accept these changes seems to be the utterly mainstream and codified, narrow boundaries of the world of TV and film. I have tried several times to intervene with these mediums but have often failed in my opinion. The levels of compromise necessary to even get a discussion of one's work on the table are so manifold that it almost renders it not worth it, and yet I continue to try to find a way of successfully combatting this. One of the more successful I felt was making the feature film Unarmed But Dangerous that sought to redress the ridiculous notions around ability in an action film. Casting me as the lead in a classic retribution gangster style violent film was a direct rebuttal of all the cultural notions accepted in this genre around disability being equated with the need of help, salvation, care, protection, by making my character the bearer and not the recipient of such qualities. The audiences were the polar opposite of my usual, and although at least 60 per cent of those audiences were no doubt left thinking exactly the same about disability as they had done before watching it, I would hope that the other 40 per cent were in some way changed. I continue to make work that confronts that which I seek to demolish, I seek out more and more ways to do this, and have for the last few years been collaborating with various non-disabled artists in an attempt to mature my messages. In this way, I have founded with my current art and life partner Julie Atlas Muz, ONEOFUS, a production/art company that can house all the work. To date we have produced a series of shows called The Freak & The Showgirl, and more recently the theatre piece Beauty and the Beast, with a museum's piece about the reductive and dehumanizing aspects of the historical representation of disabled people within their exhibitions called 'Cabinet of Curiosities: How Disability was kept in a Box' to be the next series of works (https://www.facebook.com/weacceptyouoneofus). More than anything else, I encourage other disabled and non-disabled artists to work with each other; let's all find a way out of segregated artistic scenes and movements, let's all be in it together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]