Objects and Memory.

This year has been hard, a kind of unravelling and stressful revealing to me as I’ve met barriers along the way, but it also helped me to use the noises we don’t often use and use our body as an instrument in of itself.

Response to The Magician

Hearing the air sit 

on the blades of grass slowly swaying 

Above the soil 

Above the soiled sun 

Oily ground 

Green blades poke out of the 

Skin of the ground 

Folding trees 

The leaves fold over like shirts and ironed clothes 

I in my crumpled dress on the ground. 

I in my wrinkled concerned face

Skin peeling 

Shedding myself

Where I had burnt all my being 

Out in the sun under water

Bathed in a film of H20.

My internal dialogue has always been deeply poetic and cluttered and so I always had to make layered sound pieces, often collages of words and sounds. My internal dialogue has often been likened to an audio description for blind audiences and also text descriptions of songs for d/Deaf people. I’ve always been called a Word Painter ever since I began to share my writing more openly on facebook in 2007. 

It wasn’t until Eluned joined us a live captioner that the description Word Painter was used again and here other AiRs have used my autistic way of being/speaking through Eluned as access to music. 

This made me question why when autistic women like myself make art we are still often overlooked but when it is delivered as an access technique it is spotted as something tremendous. 

It was when I was editing Magical Women’s blog on the Disability Arts Online’s platform that I realised my voice was not accessible just like many other neurodivergent women’s voices as I had to edit the blog sometimes over 20 to even 50 times before it finally accepted the blog article. And I realised, Neurodivergent women speak in a passive voice. 

So when I began working with my Music Tech it dawned on me why my music was so often inaccessible to mainstream audiences but even also my fellow AiRs and my project manager - who I still to this day am so grateful for accepting me onto this residency because I never get through interviews for residencies and opportunities in the arts. My Music Tech transformed the accessibility of my work because he could fill in the gaps where I can’t sequence processes and finally I was able to speak in the active voice, something I’ve never done before. 

And as I began sharing work that I made with access support, my fellows AiRs and Daryl began responding to me differently and not feeling my work as melancholic or overwhelming due to it being drenched in emotions and senses and sound.

In this way, my music retains my highly sensory way of being and making, but now finally audiences can access it without feeling overwhelmed. 

Jo-anne Cox on cello in collaboration with Elinor for a performance - Journey to the Stars! 18th November 2020