About this Short Film
Painting With Cheryl (Lacey McGrechan, Australia, 2020) explores the connections between family, art and emotion. Through scenes of painting and quiet domestic moments, the film attends to the experiences of an adult living with physical disability and using a wheelchair. McGrechan's work is intimate without being intrusive, offering space for individual feeling and everyday care. It sits comfortably within the Focus on Ability International Short Film Festival, which highlights films about ability, achievement and creative expression. Painting With Cheryl gently prompts viewers to reflect on how creativity, relationships and personal resilience shape a life.
Film Details
Film Transcript
I also like painting because it helps me to regulate my emotions. If I'm feeling sad it comes out in my painting; if I'm feeling happy it comes out in my painting.
This particular project I am doing, I am making up place cards in my daughter's wedding. I even have some of my earlier paradigms hanging in my house.
It surprises people sometimes that I'm a mum because they can't sort of connect together a wheelchair and parents should. But one of the interesting ways you got around when my daughter was a baby is I would push her pram; my mum or dad would push me, so we started calling ourselves a road train when we go through shopping centres or we go to parks or we go somewhere to eat.
As she is growing up we sort of worked together to find ways for her for me to move around with her, like she would stand on my footplates while I push the chair until she was old enough to reach the push handles. Then she would push me by putting her hands in the middle of the back of the wheelchair and just pushing with all the much she had. She had people tell her she was brave, but then she'd usually turn around and go, "I'm not free, she's my mom."
Then when my nieces and nephews came along they sort of mimicked what she did, so they started writing on my lap.
I tend to think of my disability as something I have to consider when I'm doing something, but it's not like a major barrier in my way. I just have to maybe approach things from a different direction.
Filmmaker
Lacey McGrechan is the filmmaker behind this entry. See every Focus on Ability entry from Lacey McGrechan.
Thanks you Lacey and Cheryl. That put a huge smile on my face
Loved hearing your story Cheryl. Thanks for sharing.