This body of work was created during a period of research and reflective practice, for which I was awarded a grant by Creative Scotland’s Create:Inclusion fund in spring 2022. It culminated in an exhibition of a selected pieces in September 2023 at Glisk exhibition space, Burntisland, Fife.

I used several mediums, including handmade inks created from foraged botanic materials, commercial and handmade watercolours and inks, as well as mark making in pen and charcoal, wax resist and text. I developed a process, using the water based materials to flood the surface, while being attentive to their movements, directing and responding, each decision creating new possibilities, a conversation between my acts and the work itself. What emerged were energetic expressions of change as it was occurring, in my mind and on the painted surface. The surface records moments of freedom and decision, change and response. It is an expression of my belief in processural ontology, the endless movement of process and change, the fluidity of the self and its relationality with the more than human world.

“a sea of wandering: to ambiguity, to fragility, to drifting“

During the 15 month period of research and development, I read widely, poetry, philosophy, autobiography and literary theory: which eventually led me to the work of Martinique philosopher and writer Edouard Glissant, in particular his ‘right to opacity’ and writings on postccolonial ontology, which struck me as visiting some similar points of theory by autistic thinkers, but from a different perspective. His work chimed with the explorations I was making with my neuroponds and vessels series. The title of my exhibition at the end of the period ‘Across Their Many Islands’ comes from a conversation between Glissant and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist:

“These archipelagos must encounter each other because, across their many islands, interdependence and difference coexist – and, in this way, they carry the energy that is necessary for our whole globe, our whole world. We might currently believe that this energy derives from military or economic force, but that is not so. It lies in the ideas and the poetics of how we organise the world…They open us to a sea of wandering: to ambiguity, to fragility, to drifting, which is not the same as futility.”

I consider the work figurative; a tongue in cheek metaphor for ‘bodies of water’, ponds are areas of water which are continually changing, although they are registered as one thing, they are in reality a constant process, their boundaries amorphous and porous, intermingling with surrounding soil. Their inner complexity is unknown to the outside observer, opaque. My figure/ponds/vessels float alone, or intertwined, or in groups. In some I explore possible connection and disconnection based on expectations of what a neurology is ‘like’, and between neurodivergent individuals and a neuronormative construction of reality. Here I was reading Damien Milton’s theory, the ‘double empathy problem’ and the political analysis of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by Robert Chapman in their book The Empire of Normality. To quote Glissant again:

“We need archipelagic thinking, which in one that opens, one that conforms diversity – one that is not made to obtain unity, but rather a new kind of Relation. One that trembles – physically, geologically, mentally, spiritually – because it seeks the point, that utopian point, at which all the cultures of the world, all the imaginations of the world can meet and understand each other without being dispersed or lost.”

In the studio I read poetry, and listened to music, using these as ritualistic ‘ins’ to achieving particular states of mind, to reach a flow state beyond linear, rational thinking and programming.

The inks I made were from plants foraged in marginal urban areas – pieces of land which are ex-industrial, and liminal in their state of danger from human development at any time – and from plants considered weeds and shrubs growing independently in nooks and crevices, not sanctioned or acceptable but habitually tidied away, cleared.

Neuropond 2 – Slugs and Crows

Neuropond 4 – Layers of Abstraction

Left to Right – Neuropond 1 – Fluidity, Neuropond 2 – Snails and Crows, Neuropond 3 – Euphoria, Neuropond 4 – Layers of Abstraction

Reading, researching, dreaming…key texts

Neuroqueer Heresies: notes on the neurodiversity paradigm, autistic empowerment and postnormal possibilities, Nick Walker, Autonomous Press 2021

A Mismatch of Salience: explorations of the nature of autism from theory to practice, Dr Damien E M Milton, Pavilion Publishing 2017

Authoring Autism / on rhetoric and neurological queerness, Melanie Yergeau, Duke University Press, 2018

Letters to My Weird Sisters: on autism and feminism, Joanne Limburg, Atlantic Books London 2021

Autistic Disturbances: Theorising Autism Poetics from the DSM to Robinson Crusoe, Julie Miele Rodas, University of Michigan Press, 2018

Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism, Robert Chapman, Pluto Books, 2023

May Tomorrow Be Awake, Chris Martin, Harper Collins 2022

The Kissing of Kissing, Hannah Emerson (poetry), Milkweed Editions 2022

The Wanting Way, Adam Wolfond (poetry), Milkweed Editions 2022

podcast conversation between Katherine May and Bayo Akomolafe, How We Live Now

These Wilds Beyond Our Fences, Bayo Akomolafe, North Atlantic Books 2017

The Minor Gesture, Erin Manning, Duke University Press 2016

Out of the Clear, Erin Manning, Minor Compositions New York, 2023

Introduction to the Poetics of Diversity, Edouard Glissant, trans Celia Britton, Liverpool University Press, 2020

Archipelagos, Édouard Glissant and Hans Ulrich Obrist, trans Emma Ramadan, Isolarii, Common Era Inc 2022

Catnosat: Indigenous Art, Knowledge and Sovereignty, eds Liisa-Ravna Finbog, Katya Garcia-Anton, Beaska Niillas

Sami Art and Aesthetics: Contemporary Perspectives, ed Seven Aamold