My art practice has taken an unexpected turn of late. I guess it comes from hanging around in online spaces with people who are musically inclined: I’ve started to work with sounds and musical composition.
I already had an iPad Pro 12.9″ that I got towards the end of last year for digital artwork, and added a regular iPad to that in December. I’ve now added an iMac to my growing collection of computer hardware; I also bought Logic Pro X which is a digital audio workstation, the full-featured equivalent of the free GarageBand app that ships with Apple devices.
While I’ve not been very productive when it comes to my visual art since this country went into COVID-19 lockdown, I have been managing to express myself through the medium of music. I don’t have a lot of experience of playing an instrument–my last training was a brief series of piano lessons as a child–but I did learn the basic vocabulary and some simple keyboard skills.
This is the first track I’ve created, a fairly chilled-out electronic dance number. It started life as experimentation to become more familiar with the application but evolved into a complete composition. I hope you enjoy it, and I’m hoping there’ll be many more where that came from.
It’s been a long time since I sat down and wrote something. So long that I wondered whether I still possessed the ability.
My life has changed a lot over the last couple of years. I got out of an abusive relationship, found a place to live. Started to live in a very real sense. After years of being who others wanted me to be I began to discover who I was.
I discovered–perhaps that should be re-discovered–a love of art and made the time to explore and indulge this growing passion. Regular visits to galleries and exhibitions punctuated my own creative exercises, drawing and painting, as I quickly realised that my desire was to build up my own visual arts practice.
That continues to develop, and I’m certainly blessed with the most wonderful collection of friends who offer support and advice. As this interest has risen I’ve found that one casualty–the other end of the seesaw–was my long-established interest in programming.
I’m not sure if that reached its natural conclusion and faded after more than thirty years, or if it was affected by the severe mental health problems I’ve endured since leaving the toxic situation I had been in. It doesn’t actually matter.
My life has reached a point where I feel pulled towards a new destination. The road I’m on branches here, and the path I expected to take no longer calls to me. I’m not sure where my steps will take me from now on, but alongside trepidation at the prospect of upheaval I am feeling excited and eager to explore new lands.
Being both impulsive and risk-averse, I feel conflicting urges to simply jump in feet first while also planning every step in careful detail. Because I have commitments I’m taking the careful option and researching my choices. I’m working on keeping my existing career going while I first explore and then build an alternative, and then I plan to transition from one to the other.
It might not all work out, but I’m taking the advice of Neil Gaiman in his book Art Matters. To “make good art” for sure, but also to imagine my goal as a distant mountain and whenever I’m not sure which way to go, to make sure I’m heading towards that mountain.
In the last year I have sold an artwork, and I’ve had work exhibited. I’ve been lucky, but then to some extent we make our own luck. I’d love to exhibit and sell more work, but more than that I want to make more art. There’s joy in seeing my work appreciated, but the most joy comes from the act of creation itself.
Reaching this turning point has been difficult, tumultuous. I’ve struggled to rekindle a sense of purpose, but there’s direction in my life once again and it’s not one I would ever have imagined even just a few years ago. I’ve changed and that change has unlocked the door to a different world, one in which I feel I belong. All that remains is to build a home there for myself.
Yonder is one of those words that I love for the memories and feelings it evokes. For me it has ties to childhood and family, to places heavy with significance, and to lost loved ones.
The past twelve months seem to have passed quickly as I sit here looking back over them. I’ve been places both real and figurative, seen amazing sights and met some lovely people. There have been highs I could scarcely have dreamed of, and lows I would rather not dwell on.
In January I travelled to Sweden for the first time to visit my daughter who had moved there the previous summer. We had a lovely time hanging out together and I got to indulge my tea habit.
Leaving her to return home again was a bit of a wrench, but then later in January I went to my first spider show (SEAS–South East Arachnid Show) with dear friends Gemma and Dom. I didn’t indulge myself but did help a certain person acquire four tarantulas.
Fast forward to March and, wearing my Autistic Inclusive Meets director hat, a trip to Parliament with Emma for the launch of the Westminster Commission on Autism’s report into harmful fake autism cures. As you can see we were completely in awe of our surroundings and took it all very seriously.
May brought a visit to the British Tarantula Society’s annual show in Warwickshire and the acquisition of my first tarantula. Not bad for a woman who used to be afraid to get into bed if she saw a spider on the bedroom wall or ceiling.
By the end of June I was counting down days, eagerly anticipating my upcoming visit to Canada and the opportunity to meet and hang out with my beloved friend Patricia in person.
We had an amazing time over the two weeks I was there, getting to travel across the Maritime provinces, visit some wonderful places and meet lovely fellow-neurodivergent people. I completely fell in love with Canada.
It almost broke my heart to leave and come back home: how I cried. But I’d not even been back two days when my daughter arrived from Sweden for a visit with her boyfriend. It was fantastic seeing her again and we got to do some fun things together including visits to Stonehenge and the Natural History Museum.
Unfortunately, after her visit burnout hit me hard along with PTSD from the relationship I talked about in my previous post: I ended up being off work for the best part of two months before starting to recover towards the end of the year. It was a difficult time with several episodes of self-harm.
In the middle of September, while I was off work, I got to visit Stroud and meet up with my dear friend Sonia before going to see the fabulous play The Duck by Rhi Lloyd-Williams. (Note to readers: the play will be touring at some point in 2019 and I highly recommend going to see it.)
I’d been having something of a midlife crisis in the midst of my mental illness, and realised that I needed to make space in my life for artistic expression. I bought myself a copy of Neil Gaiman’s Art Matters, illustrated by Chris Riddell, and found it truly inspiring.
It didn’t hurt one bit to get these encouraging words from Neil himself either. Feeling inspired, I got an additional boost when invited to be part of the launch event for close friend Jon Adams’ charity, Flow Observatorium.
I was also deeply honoured when Sonia asked if I would read a message from her since she wouldn’t be able to attend. That month, September, also saw me turn forty five and was a turning point in my mental illness as I began to recover.
October saw me teaming up with Gemma to welcome the newest regeneration of our favourite Time Lord: we were both agreed that we loved the Thirteenth Doctor as portrayed by Jodie Whittaker.
Less than a week later and I was meeting another lovely friend, Naomi, in a field down in Sussex for the re-enactment of the Battle of Hastings at Battle Abbey. Great day out that would be hard to top.
Having said that, November excelled itself as I went to the O2 Arena to see Florence + The Machine live in concert. Wow! Utterly breathtaking, and an experience I won’t forget in a hurry. The atmosphere was so positive that I was buzzing for days.
Rounding off the month, I got to visit Tate Modern and experience some exceptional works of modern art, including some de Stijl paintings by van Doesburg and Mondrian, a whole room of Mark Rothko, and so much more. That day was completed wonderfully with a meal in the company of Emma and Amy, fellow directors of AIM.
Into December now, as a couple of weeks later I was back up in London for a meeting with a PhD research student from France, following which I bumped into dear friend Jon. We had a good chat before I left to explore the National Gallery, just off Trafalgar Square.
It’s no exaggeration to say I was in heaven! Over the course of nearly four hours I wandered the galleries, lost in a kind of rapture. It’s hard to single out individual works, but the four van Gogh paintings on display were beyond comparison! I stood in front of each of them, examining the brushwork, feeling the emotion laid onto the canvas along with the oil paint.
And so at last, with no little conceit, I finish up my review of the year by placing a painting of my own alongside the genius of Vincent. Not for comparison, not for any other reason than this: 2018 was the year I finally felt comfortable calling myself an artist. And that makes it a good year.
Young Woman Powdering Herself—Georges Seurat, c. 1888-90
I treated myself today: I visited the National Gallery at Trafalgar Square in London and spent several blissful hours wandering, lost in contemplation of the exceptional collection of paintings on show there.
It’s hard to describe an experience to somebody who has little to compare it against. What would it be like to sense magnetic fields, or see the polarisation of light? How would it feel to be a cat?
You might speculate but there is no way to know. All you can do is imagine, drawing parallels with things you’ve seen or felt yourself. And it’s the same when somebody neurotypical tries to understand the experience of being autistic.
The same applies going the other way, of course. An autistic person like myself can never experience being neurotypical either. There’s even a name for this: the Double Empathy problem.
The thing is, while most of us autistics are all too aware that we experience the world differently to neurotypicals and that neurotypical assumptions about us can sometimes be wildly inaccurate, few neurotypicals have the equivalent insight.
This leads to misinterpretation of autistic behaviour when it’s viewed through that neurotypical lens. When all you see of something is what’s on the outside, you have to guess what’s going on inside based on what you’re familiar with. In this case, assuming that the causes or triggers are the same for autistics as for NTs.
We autistics are a minority neurotype. The consequence of this is that while we encounter NTs frequently, they don’t meet us nearly as often and don’t have the same opportunity to become familiar with our differences. We aren’t well understood, and that can lead to fear.
Filling that gap in understanding is so important, but there’s a communication barrier. How can we describe our internal experience in a way that neurotypical people can relate to without making it seem like a minor variation? That’s how we end up with misunderstandings like, “We’re all a bit autistic.”
I don’t have the answer. I don’t even know if there is an answer but I keep searching. There certainly is such a thing as an autistic experience because so many of us can relate to each other in ways that don’t happen between us and neurotypical people.
I’m autistic: I know how that feels. I can describe how it feels in ways that other autistics can relate to, but there’s always a frustrating gap in understanding with a neurotypical audience. The shorthand that works fine with others who share my neurotype loses meaning with those who have a different neurology.
My belief is that science alone–psychology, neuroscience and so on–probably won’t arrive at an answer any time soon. It’s going to require fresh approaches that break down the traditional barriers between disciplines to approach it from new directions.
Because communication lies at the heart of the problem it will undoubtedly need to involve those who specialise in those fields. Not just linguistics but all manner of communication: the domain of artists.
An over-reliance on words and repetition of established patterns makes new directions and new shapes of thought much more difficult: a poet or painter can capture and convey the feeling of an experience in a transcendent way.
Think of a simple experience: perhaps eating a chocolate. While the mechanics are important–body heat melting it, the action of chewing and swallowing, the workings of the taste buds and digestive system–they don’t tell you how it feels. There’s a whole level of description missing.
Bridging the communication gap will take a combined effort, a multi-disciplinary effort. New thinking is needed to break out from the confining paradigms we find ourselves with right now.
People pushing Always rushing Hair needs brushing Time is crushing Pressure rising Work downsizing Unsurprising I'm devising My escape
'Cause...
Life's too frantic Ain't romantic This gigantic Transatlantic Corporation My vexation Their fixation What's vacation?
You pay your bills You take your pills Still look for thrills Run to the hills Find what's missing Reminiscing Start dismissing All that's wrong Take a long Look at life Cut the strife Wield that knife Quell the shakes Soothe the aches Hit those brakes!
As I write this I’m not sure if I’m going to post it but I need to collect my thoughts, analyse what lies beneath my severe depression and inability to lift out of this state for any length of time.Read more ›
A personal exploration of autism from a brother’s perspective, including family relationships, philosophy, neuroscience, mental health history and ethics
It’s been a long time since I sat down and wrote something. So long that I wondered whether I still possessed the ability.
As I write this I’m not sure if I’m going to post it but I need to collect my thoughts, analyse what lies beneath my severe depression and inability to lift out of this state for any length of time. 
My Autistic Dance 