When disabled teenager Ayla Halewood first saw herself depicted on a mural, she thought she looked like a god. That image of her—bold, beautiful, and larger than life—embodied a kind of strength and resilience that was unlike anything she had seen before.
Ayla, who passed away from cancer just before her eighteenth birthday, now lives on in nearly all ten collaborative murals created by British artist Andy Bolton of Community Murals CIC and Jogja Disability Arts, based in Indonesia.
The project began in 2020, when Jogja Disability Arts contacted Andy to ask if he would be interested in joining forces to produce some murals celebrating disability pride.
Andy is passionate about collaborating with disabled people on work which centres their ideas and experiences, but was unsure how he would complete the project with the world in lockdown for the COVID-19 pandemic.
He chatted with his family bubble about not knowing where/how to find and photograph a model, Ayla (who was adjusting to a new prosthetic leg) joked: ‘I’m disabled. It could be me’. Andy replied: ‘It actually could be. Do you want to do it?’
Ayla’s murals are a beautiful example of how art helps us commemorate and connect with those we’ve lost, allowing their stories to live on. As Jane Harris and Jimmy Edmonds write in When Words Are Not Enough: Creative Responses to Grief, this kind of work can “liberate memories from the past and rejuvenate them in ways that become embedded in our lives today.”
Read more about the story of how these murals came to be and check out some of the images via the link below!
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