Richard is an award-winning filmmaker and artist. He uses his own experience as a disabled person to make work which addresses disability through mainstream television documentary in both arts and current affairs, and in his personal art practice. Richard’s credits as a presenter and Director include The Disordered Eye, Dwarfs In Art: A New Perspective (BBC Four) Channel 4's Dispatches series and Panorama for the BBC. As well as the award-winning The Last American Freak Show. HIs moving image installation for Unlimited "The Voice of the Unicorn" won the Sheffield Documentary Festival Interactive award in 2018 abs has been exhibited worldwide. This blog attempts to illuminate the delightful, dark and dangerous thing that is the tunnel of life... Where's the torch? He lives by the sea and does not have a cat.
Posts by Richard Butchins
213 Things About Me, a podcast about thinking, living and dying from an autistic point of view
July 9, 2020213 Things About Me is a seven-part podcast series. 213 Things About Me tells the true story of ‘Rose’, who was diagnosed with autism aged 36 and took her own life six months later. 213 Things About Me is told through a list of Rose's traits, which she made immediately ...
Hard words can be helpful – an argument in favour of informed critique
May 30, 2019Richard Butchins expounds on the merits of arts criticism, stating the case for more rigourous critique and asking questions of disability arts in how we engage with discussion about merit based on a disability perspective. Art: Noun: The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual ...
Unlimited commissions: the view from the panel
May 8, 2017Independent disabled artist Richard Butchins is in the unique position of this year having both sat on an Unlimited selection panel and been the successful recipient of an Unlimited award. Here he shares his insider insight on the selection process, offering advice to prospective applicants. The other week Unlimited published some ...
Turning Japanese
June 29, 2016At the end of last month I returned from a two-week trip to Osaka in Japan. The Arts Council gave me an Artists international Development Fund grant and I travelled to develop an artistic collaboration with Kazuyo Morita a disabled dancer. Japan is a strange place to western eyes, firstly the ...
The sight of one hand clapping…
March 14, 2016There has been a long transit between this blog and my last. The reasons are many and varied. I’m in the last throes of completing a Dispatches programme for Channel Four, it is a demanding taskmaster, the last area of television in which you must be factually accurate a difficult ...
Disabled is the new able / 30 September 2015
September 30, 2015I was at the Edinburgh festival this year. I sat on a panel entitled ‘Disability a creative advantage’ which was a fun bit of rhetorical cant. But, the thing that struck me most was the presence of disability; it was everywhere, it’s like a new ‘art’ fashion. Will there be lines ...
Comic book Crips / 18 June 2015
June 18, 2015I watched a "kerpow" of Superhero movies the other night, mainly because I just didn’t fancy another evening of Francis Bacon and Foucault. That’s the way I roll, sublime to ridiculous in less than 24 hours. I noticed a few things about the superhero movies. It’s something that has long ...
Crips mean cash: disability as a commodity
April 23, 2015The media has caught on to the idea that ‘worthiness’ sells. As a result disabled people have been more prominent on tv and within the arts, yet as a group we have been getting a rawer deal since the 2012 Paralympics says, tv producer/ director Richard Butchins. Like everything else in ...
