When I started this practice period in June 2022 I had begun with an exploration, almost academic in its nature, of concepts about autism such as monotropism, the double empathy problem, masking, the ‘lost’ generation of late identified autistic adults, bottom up thinking, increased neuroconnectivity, and so forth. The work I began with was light and playful, illustrating some of these concepts in ways I hoped were illuminating, with qualia within ‘figures’ and their interactions, connectivity, and a kind of joy in discovering a way of describing myself, people who made sense to me and the way I felt, thought, experienced my senses, and processed the world around me. I found the concept of the neurodiversity paradigm through Nick Walker to be enlightening (I love a good paradigm shift), and so much of my own thinking clicked into place.

As the work has progressed and I pushed on with my reading and exploration (foragings and burrowings) I found an even deeper and closer connection with what I have always felt, but struggled to articulate myself in language, through writers Nick Walker, Melanie Yergeua, Bayo Akomolafe, Katherine May, Chris Martin and the poets Amelia Bell, Hannah Emerson and Adam Wolfond, and thinkers as diverse as Édouard Glissant, bell hooks, Audre Lorde and Timothy Morton, as well as Saami artists and thinkers and the music of David Byrne, Elizabeth Fraser and Fiona Apple. This was a futurity, a way of acting and looking forward while honouring the complexity of both humans and the more than human world, through diversity, abundance and queering. My work, too, evolved to somewhere both instinctive and exact, with spontaneity and intentionality, tapping into the kind of painting practice I love, where the flow is coming from a source I can’t place cognitively. I put things down while I’m getting a clear message, even if the message is ‘keep going, I don’t know yet’, and I stop when I reach ‘enough’. The work is figurative, through metaphors of ponds and vessels, and landscapes, in book form and through photography and text from poetry and songs.