I come to artistic practice by way of quilters, ceramicists, writers, dancers, and my own younger self who ask me, indirectly or directly, to be open to and tend to the way things fall apart. This manifests through tapestry-making of all kinds: patchwork, collages, writing, dreaming. I delight in piecing things together while allowing the work to take on its own form, embracing inherent unruliness.1 The quilt I crafted in conversation with my mother’s dissertation2 unraveled partially in its first wash; a creative choice and collaboration I chose to honor instead of disappear. Holey—holy—textiles abound. This turn to creative dissolution is a material metaphor for access practice, but it is also a provocation for being in this world. A textile prayer that embodies part of my commitment to (re)claim an innate, clefted aesthetic; this unraveling is clefting in action.

Both quilted and quilter, I belong to a lineage of wide open ones.3 My mother and I came into this world with cleft lips and palates, forty-one years apart. Clefted folks are born—and live—in the space between: edgewalkers.4 The success of our ‘care’ within contemporary culture hinges on our very disappearance. Beautifully, my mother’s and my presence tugs at this outcome. Such a complex inheritance, embedded in the austere oil-rich lands of my west Texas birthplace, taught me how to make home within a test site. Amidst a culture committed to extraction and beautified façades at all cost, my innate openness stirs unease in many. Like my mom, I spent my childhood being woven and sutured into others’ vision of my embodiment, each fiber of my visage arranged into one fabricated whole. My whiteness was celebrated when my queer, femme, disabled selves behaved. Read: when my mouth was shut. My lineage of care encompasses those who understand my clefts as problematic chasms to close, of which erasure was the only option, and those who encourage me to pull at the threads and bare (sic) witness to the openness therein. Reveling in the abyss is my birthright.

I interface frequently with staff at arts organizations who are keen to bring more accessible practices into their environment, or so they say. The underlying, albeit ‘good intentioned,’ desire in many of these initial conversations lies in the (typically nondisabled) assumption that access exists to bridge a gap: between disabled and nondisabled experience; ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal;’ culturally acceptable and othered. Though seemingly benign and even lauded, the sneaky, slippery assertion in this approach is that access serves to erase difference. Successful access happens here when the nondisabled ‘public’ is unaffected and largely unaware that we are sharing space. And when the success of our own cure demands that we—disabled artists, access workers, and audiences—also buy into the fallacy of masked nondifference, we may become entangled and complicit in this cultural precedent, too. This approach to accessibility not only lacks luster, but entirely revokes disability-centered agency, creativity, and choice. When access serves to disappear a multifaceted disabled experience, we wholly miss a much more spacious potential. It seals all of us off from the possibility that we could coexist amidst our innate openness; it disappears that generative gap.

Sophie Strand, author and self-proclaimed compost heap, writes that in order to survive we must risk new shapes by celebrating the breach.8 It is a risky endeavor, clefting. Rather than bridging a gap, new shapes emerge when we become open to unraveling a false (w)hole. The process is not void of friction, discomfort, or unsteadiness.9 It is a process informed by disabled experience, after all. The invitations that pull us in are crucial: Where do things unravel? How can we unravel? How can we prepare for and honor this glorious unraveling, together?

Where do things unravel? In order to unravel, we must first start with something tangible. Teasing the edges and pulling at threads requires something to already exist that we can tug. Access, as invoked by ADA compliance, generally encompasses that which is minimally needed: ramps, elevators, accessible bathrooms. Yet as I write for disability community, we know that this foundation appears deceptively and unrealistically solid. Compliant access does not create equity, nor does it tend to invite wonder or make space for curiosity. Compliant access is exceedingly good at maintaining an ‘equitable’ façade without risking any fissure in an institution’s established culture.

It is one thing to be able to sit in a theater, and it is quite another thing to be able to experience the work in that theater through a multiplicity of senses and skills. With sole focus on compliant best practice, artistic intent gets tangled beneath rote, politically correct or nondescript audio description.10 Audiences in wheelchairs are still relegated to sparse sections of the house, and only at ‘kids’ matinees can we respond wholeheartedly to the work in real time. What an immense impact it makes to enter a space, experience art, and feel that all of it was crafted to better honor your exquisite, disabled bodymind. Generations of elders devoted themselves to fighting for the tangible, physical access that has become part of the fabric of my generation’s life. In gratitude for this lineage of ongoing advocacy, we can and should unfurl beyond it.

How can we unravel? It bears repeating that unraveling rarely happens on its own. If you knit, you know that the willingness to unwind (or as I call it, ‘tink:’ knit backwards) is crucial to the process. Each unraveling tells a story of interconnection, sustainability, and care (or lack thereof). When access is an afterthought or mere commodity, the entire experience dissolves and dampens. And even the most accessible, equitable practices become tired when they are unable to evolve alongside the art itself. To sustain such creative risk, unraveling must be intentional and integral to our practice. This is an act of devotion: the sheer desire to unwind, repurpose, and alchemize one thing into something new implies a reverence for what came before. While we know the ADA is not enough, we are not casting it off entirely. We are tending and tugging at its threads, pulling them into new ways of being.

Sometimes this happens magnificently, and often the grand experimentation of it all creates friction and conflict. This is not a sign of access gone awry. These forces celebrate our coexistence. They are indicators of the intrinsic rub of culture change. We honor this coexistence not by disappearing each other or our needs, but by embracing the inherent space between us. As we unravel, we must find ways to care for the realities of tense, sometimes surprising, creatively abundant chasms. And out of this paradoxical tension, we create anew.