Introducing our cover/theme artwork
Our first Editorial provides a more detailed explanation of our cover/theme artwork. We summarise here:
The cover of our journal and general ‘theme’ of this website has been designed by Hatiye Garip.
Hatiye describes herself as ‘a colourful pencil that loves to draw and design’. A young disabled woman from Turkey, she was a European Solidarity Corps volunteer with the European Network for Independent Living in 2020. She has provided illustrations for the Washington Post, Giphy, Starbucks, Open Style Lab and has recently published her first picture book for children entitled ‘Kendi Yolumu Çiziyorum’ (Making My Own Way, published by Hippo). You can find out more about her work at her website: https://hatiyegarip.com/
Hatiye’s illustration for the Journal’s cover shows two people zooming around on a pencil-shaped rocket. The idea is to remind us all that there is ‘power in our pens’ – in our words – as writers. The person at the front is someone who is blind (they are holding the harness of their guide-dog who is also sitting on the pencil); the person at the back has no ‘obvious’ impairment. Do they have a hidden impairment? Are they a non-disabled ally? This is left for us to imagine. Hatiye also explained to us that in her imagination one of the characters is a woman, the other is non-binary.
The inspiration for the space-theme lies with a protest slogan employed by the US disability rights movement during its campaign for the American’s with Disabilities Act: ‘To boldly go where everyone else has gone before’. This, of course, is an adaptation of the famous ‘to boldly go’ quote from the TV series Star Trek, which is set in space.
On the front cover is the Earth, our beautiful planet. This is included to signal that this is an international journal. Hatiye has imagined that the characters on the pencil have wrapped an enormous banner around the globe on which is written another well-known protest slogan used by disability activists around the world: ‘Nothing About Us Without Us!’
