It doesn’t go away

I do not have a background in visual arts. I am a storyteller by trade, usually words, sometimes data. I interview people and help them articulate what they want or need to say. I trawl through thousands of rows of raw data and spot patterns and the stories that they tell. In April 2021, in order to ‘process’ a recent adult DX of Autism, I created a questionnaire to survey myself [asking questions such as ‘Give me a likely ASD memory’; ‘Describe an ASD moment today’; ‘Describe a learned behaviour from today’]. This research, because everything for me begins with research, was inspired by a design project by Georgia Lupi who tracked the personal data of her daily life to map out her experience of the pandemic which was published in the New York Times.

I post-coded the open-ended responses and identified about eight themes ranging from work, verbal expression, receptive language, sensory dysfunction, denial etc. So now I had a different story to tell but was drawn to express it visually, a thousand miles from anything I’d done previously.

The collagraph printing technique embodied my tactile sensitivity and led me to produce clothing-shaped plates and outputs that effectively expressed my aversion to various fabrics. I called the collection ‘Polyester makes me panic’.

In June 2022, I applied for Arts Council Funding to explore the remaining themes. The plan was to research and develop imagery/motifs that best depict the particular subject e.g. work, verbal expression. Then to research and test collagraph printing methods including outputs relating to the subject’s material culture all under the mentorship of James Merrigan in the Gorey School of Art.

In September 2022, I was awarded a Visual Arts Agility Award to continue this work which I plan to start in early 2023. Watch this space.