Soccer balls and Portuguese chicken

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PB and I were talking about a current arts project that one of the access committees I serve on is involved in

Five themed mosaics are being installed down a thoroughfare. The opportunity was presented to incorporate a disability themed mosaic among them, as one of the five. Nice, hey? Lots of scope to use it as an educational, barrier-lowering exercise and such. Quite an exciting thing for the committee to get it’s teeth into.

The artist had been commissioned and a workshop set up. Two of the committee’s membership; each quite different personalities went along. It seems that by the end of the exercise the mosaics, each designed to celebrate the contributions of a particular community also tied into a unified theme. Makes sense, right? Images to tie the whole street-scape together. It seems that these images were soccer balls and Portuguese chickens!

Soccer balls in honour of the local soccer team; and the chicken in homage to the Portuguese community of the area, which is apparently small but powerful.

The proposed mosaic celebrating disability sounds too complex to me  to achieve that objective. Among other images on the tile;, a youth using a wheelchair, a stylised figure representing undesclosed disability,  a blind woman knitting a scarf with a key slogan of the disability community that stretches accross the mosaic.

My question is; what makes a chicken look like a Portuguese chicken? In this age of equality shouldn’t a chicken be a chicken first?

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