Jeanne Grosse with the custom built catapult John Lash made for her.
Great article in The Cap Times about the adaptive technologies that John Lash is building. Resident Artist Jeanne Grosse is featured, as she has commissioned John for two adaptive devices to aid in her art making.
Here’s an excerpt from the article:
Let’s say you use a wheelchair and have limited use of only one hand and you want to be a professional painter. That was the dream of Jeanne Grosse. She'd been using a rudimentary catapult to fling paint and was receiving career development help through Madison nonprofit ArtWorking, which assists artists and entrepreneurs with disabilities.
“In her mind, in her creative persona, she [had] the ability and potential,” said ArtWorking Program Director Lance Owens. “She knows color super, super well” and “has a really, really clarified and distilled vision of what she wants to do and be." But without a better tool, her artistic potential was limited, he said.
Enter John Lash.
Someone at ArtWorking knew Lash, who at the time was building kinetic metal sculptures, and they asked if he could design something more sophisticated. Lash agreed, and Grosse hired him with help from the Wisconsin Department of Vocational Rehabilitation, which allots funds to help people with disabilities enter the workforce or start businesses.
Owens was immediately surprised by Lash’s approach. It began with interviews in which Grosse, who has limited speaking ability, used her letter board to answer Lash’s questions: “What do you want it to do? What can your current catapult not do that you would wish this thing could do? What do you like about the current catapult?” He also asked her support staff for input.
“It was a really exhaustive process, but it was really super person-centered,” Owens said. “He innately understood ... how the object isn't as important as understanding the mind of the person using it.”
Lash returned to Grosse with a metal catapult that let her choose how many cups of paint to attach as well as the force and angle with which to fling the paint.
But he wasn’t done. He asked Grosse to test the catapult and give him feedback so he could make adjustments. Then he left it with her for months, checking back and tweaking it again and again. “He did such incredible diligence with it,” Owens recalled.
With the new device, Grosse became one of ArtWorking’s most lucrative artists. Her vibrant painted clocks and spattered canvases sell “like hotcakes,” sometimes faster than she can replenish the supply, Owens said.
Thank you, Cap Times!
