Barcelona in a Bag

Things happen when you take a risk.

This much I’ve learned in the past few days, on exhibiting my work, Uncertain Weather System in Place, for the Magdalen Road Studios group show – Dis Locate. And I’m so glad I did.

As a multi-form artist, I work across boundaries and revel in experimentation, all of which can lead to me to take a risks if circumstances allow. For Dis Locate I submitted a completely new, site specific work of pure fusion. Yet, its resulting vulnerability has paid unexpected dividends in it’s capacity to accrue a more substantial meaning on exhibition.

In creating the work my attention was struck by the copious floor space in the building for our temporary exhibition. A former WV car show room, what abounds is flooring (and of course glass).

It prompted me to ask – what will happen if I exhibit paintings on the floor? What would such paintings look like, and how would they survive – came next. Finally, what will the viewer do when asked to look down instead of up or across? I was curious to disrupt space and create challenge.

My work is all about exile. Mainly of cultural and geographical displacement – forced and abrupt experiences of irrevocable change and loss. As the work developed it became an interlocking series of three floor based painted panels, on which I placed objects suggestive of domestic life. The resulting assemblage would be shown with no barriers, no markers. Nothing to delineate or protect it.

Natural disaster. Forced “migration”. Flight from terror. All such happenings can lead to improvised dwelling, often on an insecure floor space. So it would be with my piece.

So I knew it would be interesting, but I didn’t expect it to take on a life and a story of it’s own.

First the install – a three day affair in which my nomadic piece moved to four different locations before finding a decent shelter. It should be said that this was a protected and long distance affair, party because I was too busy to stay and talk it all through with Luís Manuel Araújo, (our amazing curator) on the first day.

This process was however demoralising. Other work found a decent pitch straight away – what was wrong with mine? This began to feel as it should do – without secure geographical moorings – I felt the poor relation. An unwanted and bothersome relation at that.

Finally, a brief conversation with Luís brought relief. A space in reserve (in case sliding doors would be opened for the PV) was made available, with the following words.

“The art is more important than the doors.”

These are the words that any refugee seeking shelter would wish to hear – you are more important than…

It’s the you matter message. The we hear you. The your needs come first.

How often will the opposite be true and the displaced find themselves at the bottom of a pile of nonessential human “priorities” created by our complex “advanced” societies.

Second – the Private View. An extraordinarily well attended rip-roaring success of an evening, at which, possibly 300 people arrived over the course of 3 hours. Busy with my guests I largely abandoned post next to my work.

Later on (much later on) I thought to return. A drink had cascaded across the floor to it’s edges. Amused, I mopped it up – what would I have done if the drink had breached the edges though? Oh a dog’s been sniffing at THAT WORK! Someone cheerfully remarked. And a pushchair nearly ran over it! said someone else excitedly.

Swept away by yet another conversation I stood observing absently, as a group of three people chatted. One stood with his back turned to the work extremely close up to my piece. He could take a step back at any moment, a somewhat distant voice in my head warned. But the gears failed to connect and I said nothing to warn him. Again I was distracted by another person to greet and moved on.

Some while later a man moved suddenly forwards, towards the previously mentioned sliding doors, and stepped right onto my painted panels. This time I called out but was too late. I seemed to move in slow-mo while he went into fast forwards.

This was the moment I came hard up against thoughts about my responsibility to the viewer – I had not protected this person from feeling horribly mortified. The work was fine. It took a while but we got through the man’s embarrassment. Even if this piece had been damaged it would have been okay. I didn’t mind because I took that risk. Momentarily though, I felt bad. I hadn’t looked after him and almost given him a heart attack!

In fact, of course, this viewer had given me a gift, and I later learned that he wasn’t the first person to tread on the work either! How deeply this speaks to us of the status of the displaced and “othered”. Of the (literally) downtrodden. We keep refugees in out of the way places and at arm’s length, where no-one thinks to look. We forget about their existence as our privileged lives carry on without a thought.

Third – invigilation. An opportunity to spend quiet time with the work. Exhibition creates opportunity to see the work with fresh eyes. The photographs above represent all the thinking engendered by the past few days, and bring out the performer in me. Thinking about the accidental intrusion of foot on board, and of the dynamics of looking in the mirror in the piece, encouraged me to insert myself and take the exploration further.

Identity and ritual emerge as themes. I’m fascinated by the way my iPhone can capture a fragmented portrait; my face in the small mirror and my toes close up to the work.

More of this please – I want to do more!

Hurrah! I’ve downloaded the logo and created the bank account. Online and hard copy forms have been sent. We’re official and our work can begin. Thank you Arts Council England!

I’m debating setting up a separate blog here on a-n for the project, but with three blogs in existence already – one of which is for the Artist’s Eye project on WordPress (so that my non-artist partners could post) it might be a bridge too far. Yet so much is happening in the studio that I’m burning to share it right here. This space is different from WordPress.

In turning this conundrum over in my mind I’ve come to see a-n blogging as a most precious conversation with a more specialised readership. I can write about my process without fear of sounding bonkers or frankly boring a wider readership.

The studio process is perhaps unique – I turn up for work and seal myself in. Preferably I speak to no-one and the hours are consumed as quickly as the bagel I gobble down between washing my brushes. Off duty, my thoughts are with the latest developments, and also the myriad non-studio tasks required to manage the project and make it happen.

I knew that this project would push me into new areas in my work. I planned to respond to Felicia Browne’s drawings by adopting graphite and charcoal into my practice, but thought this would lead to abstraction of line, which it still might.

Currently I’m working on six painted sketches. My poet collaborator and I are attempting to conjure six scenes in Felicia’s life, six vignettes (perhaps) of her short life plotting her trajectory from her birth in Surrey to her death in Spain.

The surprise has been the urge to reach Felicia through a reinterpretation of her sketches. With my hand I trace the movement of her hand. With my eye I try to capture the scenes she saw, examine the faces that fascinated her, the details she caught. I try to speak her language.

This I marry with my brush, my lexicon of line and wedge. My insistence on texture and layer. This is my language.

Something about this process feels like channelling. Is it foolish to imagine this as conversation? One friend I described my process to remarked that it sounded “like a tactile seance.” I guess it does.

Through this process I’m arriving at something new and unfamiliar. This is work I don’t fully recognise. But these are sketches – to be shown as process work at my studios for peer evalution. I’ve yet to discover what will occur when I move up scale and work on the final pieces for exhibition in the place of Felicia’s birth.

This is a detail from “Scullion with a Red Wedge.” Using both Felicia’s sketch and material from one of her letters to arrive at this composition.

photo by Stu Allsopp of me in the Empathy Booth – I think it looks like a curtsey to ACE.

My goodness me. Arts Council England have said YES.

THANK YOU SO MUCH ACE for believing in the project and in my ability to deliver it!

I can hardly take it in. After a titanic tussle with the new portal, and the significant disadvantage of coming at the process as an autistic artist, I have succeeded.

The news came through in Cafe Rouge, Leamington Spa (who deserve a special mention for putting up with disruptive behaviour – throwing a milk jug around in a wild fit of hugging and the emitting of a loud series of whoops and yelps). Fellow a-n artists/blogger Elena Thomas was with me and responsible for calming my palpitations and encouraging me to open the form.

I was simply too scared to find out the result and would have sat there (or rather hopped about) indefinitely. Dodgy WIFI may have blocked the message up to this moment, but the issue had been circumvented by piggy backing on Elena’s mobile phone bluetooth connection with the purpose of working up an idea we’re nurturing for the Museum for Object Research blog. An ACE notification was the last thing I expected to ping through.

As soon as the necessaries of opening the bank account and downloading the logo are in order I will be talking more specifically about the actual project for which I’ve been awarded funding. For now I want to talk about the other matter to emerge from my experience of this process – the process itself, with regards to access for neurodivergent or really more particularly autistic artists.

The process of application has been huge for me, both as a learning curve in a professional sense and as a personal growth experience. I will be honest, it was a gruelling ordeal which could have broken me but for the saving graces that got me through it. It feels important to let others know what they were.

So here is my check list of strategies, shared on the understanding that it won’t apply to every autistic artist. Our needs vary greatly and this is just a snapshot of what made the difference for me.

Importantly what I’m about to say is virtually all predicated on being to some degree networked in to a trusted group of arts professionals. This may not the case for many autistic artist, and in itself represents an issue of access. By nature autism can prove isolating for an artist, as so many of the professional structures through which we should be supported are social in orientation. This is why we must come together to create our own networks to support one another and to lobby for change in neurotypcial arts structures and organisations.

1. Arts Council England people interface is brilliant so do use it if this is an option for you. Indeed if you can access it I recommend you use the people interface at each point where you experience difficulty or doubt. For me this was vital as I couldn’t process the voluminous Grantium guidance notes. ACE interface includes the helpline and the option of making an appointment to talk with a Relationship Officer about your project development. A Relationship Officer can and will advise you and this proved decisive for me in arriving at a stronger application than I could have managed alone.

It must be noted that for some autistic artists talking and/ or talking on the phone can be serious access issues. More accessible information about alternatives for us is needed.

2. I was open about my autism in my application. I told ACE who I was and allowed this to be reflected in key areas of the application in which this makes a difference to the way I work. I will be writing in more detail about this in future posts.

3. I asked for generous access funding and was specific about what I needed it for.

It was challenging for me to work out the costings and calculate the help I needed but it was definitely worth doing so that I can both pay my support worker the correct wage for her work and have sufficient hours access help.

It was my experience that ACE wanted to know I would be properly supported in my work, so asking for more rather than less access help was probably a good idea.

4. I took ACE up on access assistance for the process of writing my application. We are entitled to up to 4 days of access help with writing the application. My advice would be to take it all. Your assistant will be paid.

This help is for the physical job of writing and organising your application only (no help with the concept is allowed) and you have to find your own assistant. My advice would be to try to recruit a person familiar with the application process or who is an arts professional. Someone to help with the mechanics of writing who you trust and can work with is essential but from my experience they will also need to understand the culture.

Someone who gets the culture can be instrumental in understanding how to structure your application in a way other arts professionals can access more easily. This could be crucial to an autistic artist, especially if you are applying for the first time

5. I consulted both trusted neurotypical artists and arts professionals to understand what was being asked of me by ACE. This was vital.

I can’t stress enough how important having access to a translation of neurotypical (socially embedded) content in the application form can be. It can be virtually impossible for us to tease out the implicit assumptions in this kind of application process on our own.

6. I teamed up with a project partner who has a complimentary skill set, and acted as my “gateway” professional to the neurotypcial world. For autistic artists it can be difficult to conceive how important it is to develop our projects beyond the concept, and lodge them fully into external environments. SO much of our thinking is internal and expansively so. Yet an ACE application requires a vast amount of fine detail which must be realised in the external world.

Autistic artists may naturally work solo, but it’s worth considering what a constructive collaboration may bring in terms of access. My NT partner has been decisively helpful in this respect. It wasn’t planned this way but by great good fortune my project collaborator has become a trusted facilitator.

These are my immediate thoughts on the process of application. I’ll let you know if I have any more.

It can very often feel like there’s an unbridgeable gap in understanding between autistics and neurotypicals, with a frustrating delay in that situation changing anytime soon. This is especially true of organisations with established structures and practices in place, like for example, Arts Council England.

One of the most important things NTs need to grasp is that we are a diverse group of individuals. Another is that by default we approach nearly every aspect of life from a different angle. You can guarantee this, and also that within variety there are commonalities, which make the job of NTs getting their heads around accommodating autistic people a little easier. However, a checklist approach to autistic people just won’t do.

Most salient, I would say, is that we are radically different creatures, and this means we need radical change in order to support us as professionals. The art world needs to catch on to this fast.

You have to go right with us if you want to know all about us – and not many NTs exhibit willingness in this direction. Conversely many of us have spent our lives getting to know NT culture but that’s been about survival. This is why it often feels like autistics have a better handle on the dynamics between us, and also why we often give up on NTs out of disillusionment and exhaustion.

This is why it’s vital for autistic artists to get together – in whatever way we can. Some of us are finding each other on Twitter and enjoy the dipping in and out this affords. It’s relaxed and supportive and pretty funny sometimes. We do have a sense of humour, contrary to stereotype. In fact I’d say that’s a feature of most autistic people I know. We can be hilarious. We’re also empathic to a fault. If you’re having bad day and you let some steam off online, others quickly rally.

I’ve been very lucky lately as several autistic artists have come to me through my work on the difficulty for neurodiverse individuals with both the #Grantium portal and the ACE application process in general.

It’s also been my great good fortune to have followed the incredible Jon Adams – by happy coincidence – almost since my first day on Twitter. Jon and I are now talking, after a nice lengthy build up of contact, and it’s wonderfully affirming. We talk about neurodiversity and change. We talk about the challenge of living in a neurotypical world, and we talk about our art practices.

I learn a great deal from Jon. He has a way of putting things. A turning inside out of the common assumptions society holds.

Jon has been thinking a great deal about the situation as it stands for neurodiverse artists, and has many ideas about what needs to change. It’s immensely gratifying to find we’re on the same page, and our combined autistic traits compliment one another in our efforts, making it possible to work independently and come together too – with no friction or sense that our energies are either scattered or wasted. How and why is this possible?

This is our autistic way of working together. Largely we work things out on our own and signal to one another on the basis of need only. We come together when there is something concrete to say. Don’t take it the wrong way, but we don’t need all that extra signalling that NTs seem to, perhaps because they need reassurance. Mostly we trust and respect one another’s way of doing things. This is because Jon and I recognise each other’s autism as related and this creates an implicit trust, which hardly needs to be spoken.

It’s helping us to work towards strategies with which to lobby for change. This process is also showing us our similarities as artists. Variety and commonality are ever-changing permutations within each autistic being. I find this idea exciting and quite beautiful. The scope of autistic minds and autistic thought is something alien to neurotypicals though, and this is our challenge. As one of my new artist friends Susan Kruse put it so eloquently on Twitter today,

“How can one successfully apply for #art #Opportunities when autism makes communication different?”

The short answer is that we can’t. Not without a colossal effort of translation – as I’ve said before. And often we are doomed to failure.

So it’s simple really. Neurotypicals have to take it from us autistics, because we know what we’re talking about and we have a lot to say. We know that it’s hard to understand autism in all it’s variety and splendour, so let us show you what we’re all about.

I took something precious from my most recent conversation with Jon. Jon talks about neurotypicals taking a leap of faith. We get that you don’t get it. We get that it’s extremely complicated. SO trust us when we tell you there’s problem and allow us to drive the changes that are needed.

These can’t be NT solutions. And they can’t be organised by NTs either. Allow autistics to lead and the results will be spectacular. This way we achieve equality.

The art world will also benefit from some of the most exciting polymath creative brains among the human population.

So consult with us (ACE this means you too!), ask us what we need and give us the support so that we can make it happen.

Go on arts organisations, take a leap of faith.