28/9/22 AMD MA-FMP
Neurodiverse Landscapes* – A Self Reflective Collection of Works Focusing on the Lived Experience of Neurodiversity.
The Project
To preface this project, I will provide some background on my own position in relevance to the title of this work. I was diagnosed at a young age with Asperger’s syndrome, a “high functioning” form of Autism (ASD), though at the time this meant very little to me as with little lived experience of the world I had felt no difference, real or perceived, to my peers, it wouldn’t be until much later that the differences would begin to appear, particularly throughout school, college and university, something that would only become more prevalent and obvious to myself at least as time went on and I began to find my footing in the neurotypical world.
These differences, again either external, internal, real or perceived end up creating a very difficult experience to express, as without anything to compare it to (anything lived at least) one finds themselves in a constant state of questioning, uncertainty and even doubt as you’re perpetually unsure of how you see and experience the world, how you “fit in”, how you feel, or should feel, about even the most mundane aspects of life let alone the more complex.
The goal then of this project is to create a body of work that aim to express some of these difficulties and the feelings that can arise from them through image, since expressing them through other means can be a challenge, or perhaps more so that words seem to not encapsulate the full impact or “feel” of these things. With these images, I then plan to collate them into some form of publication, either a book or a zine(s) as a record/catalogue of my personal interpretation of the lived experience of neurodiversity.
The Method
To complete this project I will primarily be working with the photographic image collecting banks of images on various subjects, thoughts, feelings, and experiences that I will then aim to compile and manipulate through a process I have used in the past by where I layer the images over one another to then alter and employ the use of blend modes and other various tools to create quite nondescript yet reasonably expressive images that will aim to create a sense of whatever the relevant feeling or aspect of ND lived experience I’m aiming to express.
These images will be a mixture of high quality digital imagery and (if possible) a selection of film based images taken in various locations, times and mindsets and will vary in form, from more descript, definite and clear subjects through to more experimental, abstract and elusive ones as once all the images are manipulated and processed in the aforementioned process the combination of clear and unclear are what make the images expressive and airing more towards the unseen response to the images over the explicit subject matter found within them.
I’m contemplating the addition of other media to further the sense of expression and to also include a far more personal element to the works being a physical embodiment of my own internal workings in regard to the subject matter, these could take the form of cut block prints which would then be either scanned or photographed in order to work with them digitally as per the other images.
Alongside this physical work I plan to conduct some research into the expression of experience through image and a personal (possibly auto-ethnographic) study into my lived experience with neurodiversity.
(* working title subject to change as the project progresses)
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