Portfolio - Sculpture
'No-one listens'
No One Listens is a totem of the autistic community.
"When I was 35, I discovered that I'm autistic. In the years since then I have come to realise the extent to which being autistic has impacted my life, and the extent to which autism is misunderstood and misrepresented by the wider community.
No One Listens therefore, is a marker, a standing stone by which I state that we are here, as individuals and a community, glorious and bright, full of joy and creativity, existing not as someone less, but someone different. I invite any autistic people to add to this and help create something as layered and beautiful as we are."
Artwork details:
Measurements - 115 x 77 x 77cm | Approximately 60kg
Materials - stonecast plaster, acrylic paint, marker pens
Base - composite wood (section of fire door) and canvas.
Not for sale.
Discs
'We all fall down'
This is an altar, it’s a liminal space between reality and fiction, it is made of the ignorance that surrounds autism, ignorance which unfortunately continues to have its fingers deep into how autistic people like me are treated by everyone from strangers to employers, the government, and even supposed “experts”.
We know how pervasive this ignorance is because we have to listen to it every day, and by the nature of autism, many of us either can't advocate for ourselves or have been so traumatised that we'll avoid conflict at any cost. This means the conversation about us routinely doesn't include us.
I invite viewers to pick up these 12 stones and read the kinds of things we're told. The black stone is off limits though.
The black stone is for the autistic children abandoned by their parents, the autistic people who were locked in asylums, the autistic children who are subjected to torturous ABA “therapy”, those assaulted or killed by the police, those killed by their parents or carers, those killed by the failings of medical practices which don't account for how being autistic may affect a patient, and most of all it's for the autistic people who just couldn't go on living in a world that treated them in the way it did.
