This post comes at the very end of this most surprising of projects. My finger has even momentarily hovered over the submit button of the final report on the Grantium portal.
Anxiety always makes me early, so I can afford to sit on it for a few days. I think I need to remind myself that this has been a research and development project. Also, that I am a neurodivergent person! This will explain why the evaluation has felt like landing a space ship on a postage stamp. We go deep!
Alongside a more polished online exhibition, I have eagerly shared many of my process works on Instagram, along with my backstory. Today I had an interesting conversation, in which I realised such process works are perhaps often not understood. The truth is I’ve been in thrall to the collage form, which has sparked a fever of making! I promised ACE I would make 16 works and I now have an archive of 215+ works stacked in neat boxes. Collage drew me in & ordered me to submit to a form I had underestimated. I would love to see it more considered in the Arts, but I digress.
Process is making, and making is art. There are even skills to be learned on the way. All obvious points I know, but I think it is easy to forget about the importance of humble making.
Today I happened also to read Against Neoliberal Dogma: Art And Creativity by Jörg M. Colberg, which I found illuminating.
“In the creative field the real outcome of anything you do is only partly provided by the end result. The process itself — that’s where the actual enjoyment (and frustrations) lie.
Social media make this fact very hard to see, because everybody only talks about outcomes (which obviously are always super successful). The struggles of the process and the inevitable failures remain hidden. Nobody wants to talk about that because in a neoliberal world, your public face depends on being seen as successful.”
It is easy to get caught in this trap as an artist, I know. I feel glad to have sprung it, because my project is about unmasking to centre my autistic identity in my work, and in any case my work has always been process-led.
Key to my unmasking is a renewed unwillingness to perform, conform or submit to neurotypical expectations. They are disabling for me, and I refuse to be shaped (and in the process crushed) by them. The process is the point.
So quite naturally this project took me deeper in to my process, and continue my research (ACE project by ACE project) to work as accessibly as I can, and find ways to articulate the need for system change. Emergent from all this process work is a new language and my fever is also that of finally finding the means to speak in a way that is not verbal or text based. I only recently identified my own situational mutism (SM), through my contact with an artist & close friend called Sonja Zelić, who is a longstanding advocate for SM.
Instagram has been my studio & my sketchbook throughout my project, & I have loved every minute of it.
Polished work can be a thing of great beauty & value, obviously. Innovative work in the making is something quite other. My project has been humbling, it has also felt generous & brave. I hope you’ll pop over to view xx
