Teresa Heartchild’s Amazing Books
Totally Amazing: Free To Be Me
Teresa Heartchilds’s unique worldview is expressed through her art. The way she sees the world, the people she meets, and her feelings about life are all told through her art, poetry and music.
Teresa’s exhibition at Gallery Gachet showcases her art, poetry and examples of her self-advocacy as a person with Down syndrome. From writing to government officials for an apology on her wrongful placement in an Ontario nursing home in 2013 – to asserting her rights to more of what she loves in life, like more mayonnaise and the freedom to be herself in Vancouver, B.C. (Teresa’s Totally Amazing book will be available for purchase and also available on Amazon.)
Buy the book on Amazon: Totally Amazing: Free To Be Me
Pretty Amazing: How I Found Myself in the Downtown Eastside
What does Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside look like through the eyes of an artist—an artist who also happens to have Down syndrome? Teresa Heartchilds’s colourful art and poetry let’s us see, hear and feel it from her unique viewpoint.
The heart of Pretty Amazing is the unexpected story of Teresa finding herself as an artist and poet. Previously, Teresa’s artistic expression was discouraged and ridiculed.
Her opening poem, I Am Alive, packs added punch when you know that her future was written off a few years ago when she lived in Ontario. In 2013, Teresa was forced into an Ontario nursing home against her will. The Ontario health-care system had wrapped her in—as disability advocate Paul Young aptly describes it —“a cocoon of impossibility”. Against her wishes, Teresa’s liberty and freedom was traded for a single bed in an end-of-life nursing home. It was a violation of her human rights. She did not want to be there. Teresa had things to do, places to go, and people to meet!
In the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, Teresa has found her voice. It is a voice that talks about feeling “butterflies”, but still finds the courage to fly. Teresa has, in her own words, been “reborn in Gastown.”
Buy the book on Amazon: Pretty Amazing: How I Found Myself in the Downtown Eastside
