Welter (2021, ongoing)

Exhibition history 2023 Visions in The Nunnery, Bow Arts, London, UK (group); Shape Arts (online)

Welter, is an ongoing, iterative moving image work made in collaboration with Victoria Gray. The work explores the affective, psychosomatosensory experience of being autistic, as well as intersecting interoceptive experiences of dissociation and complex PTSD. Through movement, text, sound and animation, the film is an attempt to communicate the invisible, phenomenological dimension of neurodivergent experience, in order to perform the rich kinaesthetic and psychic intelligences that spring from that inner world. It deliberately exploits ambiguity; of language, form, and meaning. Welter - both verb and noun - is a slippery and tense concept, evoking imagery of a writhing, messy, distress.

Welter is looking to reflect on the ways in which autistic sensory experience can enrich - and conflict with - contemporary performance and visual arts practice, as well as, more abstractly, reflect on the power and limitations of traditional linguistic communication. Informed by lived experience of stimming movements, Victoria repeats patterns of motions and postures that at times are rhythmic and wavelike and at others sharper, more staccato.