'My art career truly began after I was shot & paralysed'

After a violent injury, being a painter felt more essential than ever, writes artist Jessica Webster

My story is a thread woven into a bigger canvas. It's a uniquely South African surface, featuring a landscape that's as literal as the sacred mountains and valleys as it's abstractly configured by millions of thinking minds and acting bodies.

The landscape is flooded with the shadowy inks that permeate and traverse borders between ourselves and others. But there are also the blunt gestures that have violently circumscribed the social landscape into foul and muddy blocs of colour.

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There's a perpetual attempt to whitewash these ugly and obtuse moments - layer upon layer of opaque smears that never quite conceal the traumas and passions lurking beneath.

In 2006 I was shot in a house robbery and left permanently paralysed from the waist down. I was already a painter, and yet my career as an artist began from the moment my young attackers leapt from the cover of flower bushes. Spectrally thin, ragged figures holding rusted guns and tearing at my body. In that infinite moment, all I could see and feel was a profound sense of hurt glinting in their dark and pitiless eyes.

Their loss has become mine.

I see the carelessness with which they've been abandoned to the edges of our frayed landscape now being mirrored - in my physical pain, the struggle to move, the sense of my body dispossessed of its language, agency and identity.

The decision to paint feels essential. It's one area where I can regain a delicacy and a softness against the static shock of my paralysis. But painting is also an act of empathy for my brothers in darkness: on fresh surfaces, our tangled threads disclose a shared moment of pain, while they're reinvested with gestures of love.

My latest body of work, Wisteria, is a proverbial story of how this canvas comes to be. The paintings portray spaces of exclusion: suburban gardens where young women, such as myself, are safe to play.

But my own status as ''disabled" thrusts me to the outside of this fluorescent place, looking into that world of lithe potency and anxious performativity I once inhabited.

Now I sit quietly, peering through the trellises. Beauty. My brush stumbles on the surface - a movement that enacts the darkly complex spaces we inhabit, while it contains the universal wish for succour from those never fully present glimpses of grace.

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• Webster's exhibition 'Wisteria' is on at Goodman Gallery Cape Town until May 24.

• This article was originally published in The Times.