Introduction

When I was 17 I wrote this for an Art Show.

It is titled “The Comfort of Being Uncomfortable” 

“We are all uncomfortable in ourselves 

Because being comfortable is not allowed 

We are all taught a structure and from it we learn to be comfortable 

In an uncomfortable atmosphere

Our souls are uncomfortable but our selves are not

Because we have taught our selves that it is comfortable.”

Creating this new work helped me to identify why neurodivergent artists so often translate their work, and themselves, across various modalities, disciplines and media, and why we so often struggle with sticking to one thing, or identifying the genre of our work. I rely on reviews of my work and audience feedback in writing, so I have the words to describe my work. 

This is also perhaps why I fail at interviews or other art opportunities where creating relationships with organisations in neurotypically expected ways is a must. I am prevented by my pacing mind that races with fierce ideas and sensory moments and experiences that can render me unintelligible in the face of questions like; what do I want to explore, how can I facilitate, what do I want to create; because being forced to summarise my work into logical explanations expects the pretence that we are not utterly drenched in emotion. 

Emotion is a funny thing. It is so often perceived as egotistical or self indulgent. Society tells us to not show it in public, and so often children are bullied for expressing any kind of emotion in school. Yet emotion frames the network for our existence, for our connectivity and for our context in relation to the world. Feeling emotions, being drenched in emotion is an act of feeling in communion with others. 

The practice of sharing has unspoken rules and if you are neurodivergent these social cues so often missed in our make up radically isolates and excludes us where we suffer even more because we are not able to conform under the conditions of the small and great losses we suffer every day. 

Tonight is not merely about listening to objects or creating music for or within or about them, but to truly understand what grief means for society, but also for neurodivergent beings, and their very existence within spaces, where they are so often forced to be objects. 

As a live artist I couldn’t access spaces for so long, close to about 4 years. I became interested in how I might embrace and also exist as my neurodivergent body and as my chronic pain body; and how can I articulate that accessibly for occasions and spaces where my neurodivergent body is allowed to express itself authentically - as I have to live with it.  

And, how can I also feel care for my body through chronic pain, and through sensory overload and its differing qualities of making, thinking, speaking, behaving? 

And, what are the qualities of existence within my body? 

Many autistic or neurodivergent people talk about wearing our bodies, wearing our skin, feeling in a second skin. I’ve been telling my family I don’t feel from here since I was a very young child, feeling alien, feeling like I come from the stars. I have never ingrained the social cues of neurotypical, mainstream society. I have always had the ability to talk about death and grief so easily to the discomfort of others that I have been excluded and asked to leave for my words are too triggering, my being branded weird or strange.

Access for neurodivergent beings may simply be about being allowed to express themselves because this is the way they express the grief of lived experience. 

Philosopher Judith Butler explains, “grieving is not self indulgent, it is not egotistical because where there is grief, there is rage and they can work together for change. The act of mourning together, as a collective, as a gathering, it “is enraging, it clarifies our values, it is an act of public mourning and we need more public experiences, to feel together.” 

So as you engage with objects from my room this evening, I invite you to collectively feel, with the objects, and nature, and the world in new, transformative and relatable ways.  This performance employs these objects to make us aware about what is happening outside of the human body and the effect of human dominance on the neurodivergent being that renders them to isolation. 

Neurotypical society and mainstream systems have to understand that they create exclusion within even spaces they deem to be inclusive. As Butler argues, gender is socially constructed through commonplace speech acts and nonverbal communication that are performative, in that they serve to define and maintain identities. This is something that so many neurodivergents suffer from because they so often cannot conform to this singular identity expected of us by society. 

During this residency I have learned the importance of naming, claiming and acknowledging spaces with the genuine intention of being in them, knowing why we are there but also how to exist or be here. This has been underpinned by running Magical Women, a neurodivergent led arts project where gathering is the most important element of the collective and collaborative experience. Both things have brought me back full circle to live art-making and the power of ND language, mind and body in whichever, whatever space it is taking up. 

Even if you don’t feel that you exclude our voices or exclude our bodies, it is by never seeking to adjust your system or structure; as teachers, researchers, arts organisations and so on; that this action continues to rage on, never seeking to hear our voice or create a space for us and to truly listen to us. This is why I so often use film in so much of my sound work to describe the sound in another language, another context, another texture. The visual, in the context of film and physical composition is for me a mode for thinking and for listening (Mikkel Krause Frantzen).

A neurodivergent possesses qualities of human that are so often alien to mainstream society, it is therefore important tonight, that we take the planetary experience of relationships to express relating to each other as beings together in a space so that we can experience our grief, our feelings, our emotions, our breathing, our very acts of being, in a gathering, as a togetherness, relating and responding together in an ecological state of being so that we can mobilise and be effective within our social movements as musicians, sound artists and makers, audience members and recognise that this is the act of mourning during turbulent times. 

Because, as Judith Butler explains, “to embrace in gathering is to go on and survive the loss.” 

SHOWING BEGINS  - map - website 

I imagined a 3 dimensional map of my room.  Inviting you in on a promenade, a walk around it, and at every “site” there is an object you would be able to engage with, like a site on a city map when you are a tourist in a new city for example. As you picked each object up to engage with it - it would transform into a visual soundscape which would also be 3Dimensional with nodes for you to click on and experience the object in a different peeled back way - like a video, physical composition (artwork) or audio track. 

I created this site myself, and in the future I would like to expand upon it with a programmer or VFX artist, to embrace a more 3 Dimensional experience - a tactile experience, as close to feeling the texture of the objects as possible. 

You can read the word “Wanders” on the map of my bedroom.

Each letter symbolises an object, W is teapot, but perhaps the most important letter is S because that takes you to the Access page where all the objects are on one page. You can also find extra audio described videos or text descriptions of work. 

My audio descriptions are of both the music and what is seen within the energies of atmosphere and space on screen, expanding on this notion of emotion within the bodies of being. They  are also my responses to the identities of these objects.