A Carriage for What Remains

A wheelchair is usually built to be forgotten, a piece of machinery designed to disappear so that the person in it can be seen instead, but here it refuses to disappear at all, it grows into something closer to a shell, a cocoon, a small private world on wheels. Surrealism feels like the only honest way to show what it actually means to grow old and dependent, because nothing about that experience is as plain or as practical as the objects we build for it; there is grief in losing your own legs to a machine, but there is also, quietly, something close to wonder in being carried rather than walking, in finally being allowed to simply look at the sky instead of having to get somewhere. I wanted this object to feel less like a sentence and more like a vessel, heavy with rust and use, but still capable of holding someone gently above a world that has gone grey and quiet around them. Surrealism, to me, is simply permission to show dignity where everyone else only sees decline.