It seems that it is totally forgotten that we are all the time talking and communicating with everything around us. It is a communication that does not happen in words but via the body and instinct. As long as you are a human being on earth you are a part of it. These messages come to you too, whether you want it or not. With the situation the world is in today, I think it is becoming increasingly important to strengthen this form of communication.

Sara quoted in Katya Garcia-Anton and Liv Brissach, When the Red Calves Arrive, the Hope Returns/; Sami Healing and Sensate Sovereignty in Maret Anne Sara’s Practice – Catnosat, the Sami Pavilion

Much emphasis has been placed on different types of ‘capital’ in societies, for instance, ‘social capital’ or ‘cultural capital’. However, emotions also circulate and accumulate a sort of ‘capital’, aligning some bodies with each other within a community while marginalising other bodies.

Kirsten Thisted – Blubber Politics: Emotional Economies and Post-Postcolonial Identities in Contemporary Greenlandic Literature and Art, Sami Art and Aesthetics, Aarhus University Press, 201

While having proven a powerful strategy for achieving rights and recognition, the discourse of ‘indigeneity’ obviously comes at a price, not least because this discourse emanates from Western European philosophy and colonial mindsets – indigenous peoples remain stuck in the position of civilisation’s Other – whether in a negative sense as primitive brutes or in a positive image as a kind of corrective. In both cases indigenous peoples are defined as different….Contesting these types of dichotomous and essentialised identities is part of a current International trend.

Kirsten Thisted – Blubber Politics: Emotional Economies and Post-Postcolonial Identities in Contemporary Greenlandic Literature and Art, Sami Art and Aesthetics, Aarhus University Press, 2017

When you look at the art that has resonated with you most in your life, what you’re going to find are the maps that show you where you are, where you’re going, where you want to be and how to get there. 

That art that *shook you* in ways you couldn’t name? Those were *your* maps.

Because everyone I talk to is stuck somewhere in this wilderness, doing their best. I can’t guide them out, this shit is too deep. The work is finding their way back home to themselves.

I feel like a lot of Autistic artists have their pre-acceptance work, their breakthrough work, and their post acceptance work. After Yoshimi Wayne Coyne stops even pretending to be making ‘normal’ music. They go post-music weird. 

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.

On the practical day-to-day level of working, the vocabulary of art leads us into […] false certainties, foolish mastery, and into repetition, which is surely a sin against the future. There is no need to worry about losing one’s base or ‘identity’ […] when situated within a new set of objects and social environment. The task is to focus on that moment and to work (or, I might say, ‘to act’). If one rings too well-planned a strategy and ‘experience’ to the task, one remains in some personal past, and begins to make lies.

The Native American (Cherokee) artist, essayist and poet has proposed substituting the noun ‘art’ with the verbs ‘work’ and ‘act’. Introduction to Sami Art and Aesthetics, Aarhus University Press, 2017.

The philosopher Michael Kelly thinks of aesthetics as ‘critical thinking about the affective, cognitive, moral, political, technological, and other historical conditions constitutive of the production, experience, and judgement of art.’ Aesthetics, then, should be regarded as more than questions of beauty, sublimity, autonomy, intentionality, expression, meaning, etc. With regard to projects of art, aesthetics may also invigorate ethical and political issues, the uncanny or the abject, the nature-based or site-specific, the processual or relational, or the like.

Unstable Categories of Art and People by Svein Aamold; introduction to Sami Art and Aesthetics, Aarhus University Press, 2017

I have always said that place is crucial. There is no globalisation on the basis of a series of dilutions into thin air. Because if there is dilution, there is no relation. Relation can weave itself only between entities that continue to exist…The true relation is not from the particular to the universal, but from the Place to the world-totality, which is not totalitarian but the opposite: diversity.

p69 – Introduction to a Poetics of Diversity, The Glissant Translation Project, trans. Celia Britton, Liverpool University Press, 2020