Email: josh.k.sadler@outlook.com 

This project is a practice-as-research investigation of disability and creative practice.  I propose a situated program of creative workshop activities collaborating with disabled and neurodivergent adults living and working at The Grange Centre, my professional partner. The purpose of these sessions is to explore how ‘learnt coping mechanisms’, time-honed behaviours cultivated in response to individual difficulties, affect creative generativity and meaning-making in neurodivergent adults.

I identify neurodivergent ‘approaches’ to generative practice as approaches that call upon these mechanisms, to counter the gap of ‘non-understanding’ rendered to us by dominant neurotypical analytical practices. I want to explore not (or mis) understanding, as a tool for creative generation, reuse and communication. 

Practice sessions will consist primarily of disability led, arts-based workshop activities including theatre and devising, drawing, visual arts, pottery, photography, to name a small number. The Grange has a wide range of impressive facilities and session content will be largely dependent on individual interests of the participant. Workshops will begin as investigatory one-to-one sessions with a small number of participants, soon developing into collaborative groups working towards an exhibition, installation or performance presenting neurodivergent generative mechanics.

To be ‘Undefined’ is to exist in a space of perpetual invention. A homeless space, outside the walls of the neurotypical university; this space is not a vacuum, rather a reverberation chamber of phenomenal qualities echoing through our learnt coping mechanisms, often yielding unexpected, and unintended experiential outcomes. What happens when divergence is included in the discourse of artistic interpretation rather than excluded as ‘misunderstood’?

Investigating creative generativity in neurodivergent spectators and practitioners will forefront inclusivity and embrace the possibilities of different ways of seeing, experiencing and communicating. This work goes some way towards future-proofing the arts sector against an exclusion of voices and experiences seen as ‘other’, who access arts and its artefacts differently.