Chronic Collective
Disabled-led curatorial and artistic collective founded by queer, chronically ill artists Tara Carroll and Aine O’Hara
Ireland
Through exhibitions, workshops, mentoring programmes and social gatherings, the collective challenges the structural barriers that exclude disabled artists from cultural life. Their projects foreground rest, flexible participation, remote access and community care as essential artistic practices.
Chronic Collective collaborates with organisations including Pallas Projects/Studios, Project Arts Centre, Fire Station Artists' Studios and A4 Sounds. Alongside cultural programming, they engage in disability activism and advocacy, working with networks such as Disability Power Ireland and supporting campaigns for disability rights in Ireland.
Chronic Collective creates projects, events and opportunities that centre accessibility, care and disability culture in the arts.
Re-Flecting
I had originally planned to attend the programme in person in Dublin. The morning I was due to travel, however, I tested positive for Covid. I remember immediately feeling panic and guilt, assuming I would no longer be able to participate, that my illness had once again rendered an opportunity inaccessible. Instead, Tara and Aine responded with a level of accommodation that fundamentally shifted my understanding of access itself. Virtual participation was arranged immediately. They checked in throughout the day, ensured I could still contribute meaningfully to discussions, and even redirected part of the meal budget toward me so I could order food and preserve my energy while isolating.
What struck me most was that none of these adjustments were framed as burdensome expectations. Access was not treated as secondary administration or reluctant compromise. It was embedded into the structure of the programme itself. Looking back now, I realise how transformative that experience was for me politically as much as personally. Before encountering Chronic Collective's work, I still carried an internalised assumption that my needs were inconveniences to be minimised or apologised for. Their approach instead positioned adaptation as an ordinary and necessary part of collective practice.
In many ways, this conversation felt more like a continuation of an ongoing dialogue around survival, work, illness, and artistic practice. Speaking from my bed via Microsoft Teams, I found myself unusually candid about my own exhaustion, frustration, and fear surrounding disabled cultural labour. Tara's openness created a space where those feelings did not require translation or justification. There was an immediate understanding that often feels absent within institutional conversations and accessibility.
Early in our discussion, Tara reflected:
“Able-bodied people are able to dissociate and choose to forget, when we don’t have that luxury or privilege.”
I kept returning to this distinction between forgetting and embodiment. Chronic illness resists abstraction because the body continually reasserts itself. Fatigue interrupts productivity. Pain reorganises schedules. Access needs to reshape movement through space. What Tara articulated so precisely was the impossibility of separating political consciousness from bodily experience when your body is consistently positioned against normative systems of labour and participation.
This became particularly visible when discussing the origins of Chronic Collective itself. Before becoming Chronic Collective, Tara and Aine worked together under the name 4D Space, creating performance events and workshops centered around people who felt excluded from traditional art spaces, particularly through class and queerness. Their practice initially emerges through shared experiences of working-class life, marginalisation, and cultural exclusion, long before illness entered the equation.
Tara described this period as being concerned with:
"Art against the odds."
I found this phrase deeply resonant because it seems to encapsulate not only their early work, but the wider conditions underpinning so much artist-led practice. Cultural production here is not supported by stability, institutional infrastructure, or financial security. It happens despite exhaustion, despite precarity, despite inaccessible systems. Yet illness altered these negotiations entirely.
As Tara recounted the deterioration of both their and Aine's health, the conversation shifted toward the violence of attempting to maintain able-bodied expectations within disabled bodies. One story in particular stayed with me. Tara described attending a performance workshop after years away from work due to illness, only to end up crying alone in the bathroom, overwhelmed by how physically unsustainable the experience had become.
They recalled thinking:
“How can we make space for us to be able to perform?”
What interested me here was the shift in emphasis from individual endurance toward structural adaptation. Rather than asking how disabled practitioners can continue forcing themselves into inaccessible conditions, Chronic Collective instead asks how artistic structures themselves might change.
Throughout the conversation, Tara repeatedly returned to the relationship between disability and labour. They spoke critically about the “hustle mentality” embedded within both capitalism and contemporary art culture: the glorification of overwork, sleeplessness, constant production, and self-sacrifice as markers of seriousness or legitimacy.
They reflected:
“Damaging my body just to meet these standards that are forced upon us.”
What emerged throughout this discussion was an understanding of burnout not simply as personal exhaustion, but as a structural consequence. Tara connected this particularly to gendered expectations around emotional labour, productivity, and self-proving, especially for queer people, working-class people, and femmes navigating institutional spaces that were never designed with them in mind.
I found myself thinking about how frequently contemporary cultural work romanticises overextension. The exhausted artist remains culturally legible in ways the resting artist does not. Yet Chronic Collective’s practice actively refuses this framework. Rest, delegation, flexibility, and interdependence are not framed as failures of professionalism but as necessary conditions for sustainable practice.
This was especially evident when Tara discussed their working relationship with Áine. Rather than idealising independence, they described collaboration as fundamentally rooted in mutual support, communication, and redistribution of labour depending on fluctuating capacities.
They explained:
“Sometimes one person takes more of the workload while the other can’t.”
What interested me most was how this model directly challenges dominant ideas of artistic authorship and productivity. Within neoliberal structures, dependence is often framed negatively: as weakness, inefficiency, or lack of professionalism. Chronic Collective instead positions interdependence as an access strategy.
This extended beyond their own partnership into wider conversations around assistance, delegation, and institutional responsibility. Tara discussed employing a studio assistant, requesting support workers within funded projects, and learning to allow others to help carry workloads previously undertaken alone.
They reflected:
“It’s hard to transition from doing everything yourself.”
I found this particularly affecting because independence is so frequently framed as the ideal form of adulthood and professionalism. Yet for many disabled practitioners, survival depends precisely upon rejecting this myth of total self-sufficiency. Access instead becomes relational: negotiated collectively through care, communication, and adaptation.
Another moment that stayed with me emerged while discussing expectations around quality, ambition, and limitation. Tara spoke openly about the grief of no longer being able to realise every idea or maintain previous levels of productivity.
They reflected:
“This is what I was able to do. And it’s still valuable.”
I kept returning to this afterwards because it articulated something I continue struggling with within my own practice. Illness forces constant confrontation with limitation: limited energy, limited capacity, limited time. Yet capitalist and institutional structures rarely accommodate limitation without framing it as failure. What Chronic Collective proposes instead is a reframing of value itself. Worth is not determined solely through scale, efficiency, or output.
Toward the end of our conversation, Tara spoke about seeking collaborators who are communicative, adaptable, and willing to rethink established working methods through disability justice frameworks.
They explained:
“We’ll figure out a way.”
What stayed with me most about this statement was its simplicity. Disability justice here does not emerge through perfection or institutional mastery, but through willingness: willingness to adapt, to problem-solve, to communicate differently, to remain flexible, and to collectively negotiate access rather than treating it as fixed compliance.
Throughout our discussion, I became increasingly aware that Chronic Collective’s work does not simply advocate for accessibility within the arts. It fundamentally reimagines what cultural infrastructure could look like if built around care rather than extraction. Their practice challenges dominant assumptions surrounding productivity, professionalism, independence, and value, insisting instead upon interdependence, sustainability, and access as collective responsibility.
What I ultimately took from this conversation was not only practical insight into disability-led practice, but a deeper reconsideration of what artistic survival itself can mean. Chronic Collective’s work refuses the idea that disabled practitioners must endlessly adapt themselves to hostile systems to participate. Instead, they ask what becomes possible when systems begin adapting toward us.
Within the context of this project, their practice continually returns to the curatorial potential of the prefix RE. Throughout our conversation, I became increasingly aware of how Chronic Collective operates through processes of reimagining, restructuring, renegotiating, and redistributing. Accessibility is not approached as retroactive correction, but as an ongoing process of rethinking how cultural work is organised in the first place. Labour is redistributed according to capacity. Professional expectations are renegotiated through disability justice frameworks. Artistic infrastructure is restructured around care, flexibility, and interdependence rather than extraction and endurance. Even rest itself becomes a form of resistance: a refusal of the relentless productivity demanded by both capitalism and contemporary art culture.
Perhaps most significantly, Chronic Collective’s work proposes a redefinition of value. Rather than measuring worth through output, speed, or institutional legitimacy, they centre sustainability, communication, and collective care. What emerges is not simply a more “accessible” version of existing art structures, but an attempt to fundamentally reimagine what those structures could become. In this sense, the RE within their practice is not only methodological, but political: a continuous process of refusing inherited systems and rebuilding new ways of working within and against them.