I have an art exhibition coming up in Melbourne

April 11th-May 2nd,
Gallery 15,
15 William St, Melbourne.

open Monday-Friday 9am-6pm.
info@peakevents.com.au

It’s a wonderful inner city gallery involved with a program called Art for a Cause in which artists can use their work to raise awareness or funds for a cause they support.

The exhibition, called Alternative Normalities; An Introspective by Donna Williams, will feature an affordable collection of 30 new, highly textured works in several new collections with some of the proceeds going to DEAL Communication Centre and Autism Victoria.

Dreamscapes

The Dreamscapes collection features interactions in dreamscape atmospheres.

My own dreams are almost always non-verbal.

Verbal speech was comprised of echoed strings, advertisements, jingles, songs until I was around 9-11 years old when I was still being tested for deafness and the meaning-deafness associated with my language processing disorder was better understood.

After that I was taught, through a picture-word dictionary, gestural signing and the use of representational objects used to augment language processing, the one-word/one meaning system of interpretive language.

As a result, today I can use verbal interpretive language that is understood by others but because this system was acquired late it is still often a conscious process and this may be why it hasn’t filtered through much into my dreams.

What this means for my dreams is that they rely, instead, on my strongest processing styles – the physical and kinaesthetic world of movement and the world of systems and relationships between pure concepts.

The Dreamscapes collection captures that physical and kinaesthetic world of movement and how movement alone conveys a rich language.

Emotions

The Emotions collection features far more surreal worlds of almost pure ARTism in which the characters are both solitary and yet somehow ‘interactive’.

I’m a solitary learner and don’t learn well in social groups.

I prefer to dwell on the peripheries where I can map, pattern, theme, feel as part of a ‘system of sensing’ which is more dominant for me than conscious learning based on interpretive meaning.

I am drawn to the world of experiencing shape, form, texture, colour, light on an interactive and interpersonal level than I am the verbal world of intellectual ideas.

Until my 20s I interacted directly with the elements; wind, rain, light, with sounds and textures around me and felt social in relation to nature and objects, unable to distinguish any hierarchy of ‘company’ between these types of interaction and those with other humans.

So whilst these characters appear solitary, in my world and perception, they are not, and are highly interactive.

Interactions

The Interactions collection features a lack of visual context. The backgrounds are reduced to texture and the colours reduced to variations in ambiance.

Being someone who is mono-track, I struggle to process more than one realm at a time, so here the emphasis is on the interactions, with the subsequent processing loss of the surrounding context.

Yet the interactions themselves speak adequately without ‘background information’.

Often it is the ‘background information’ that clutters the language processing or interaction capacity of those struggling with information processing differences rather than helping to make sense of things.

This is especially so with meaning-blindness, in which one processes the part but loses the whole or context blindness in which one is unable to process events in direct relation to the wider visual context.

I have visual perceptual processing challenges, have a processing delay in recognising my surroundings and objects with meaning and am generally face-blind.

Like most face blind people, the emphasis shifts to other forms of recognition; tone of voice and speaking style, movement styles, hair color and style, type of clothing and colour of clothes.

It becomes a world in which all people are either strangers or friends and in which friends, at least visually, remain ‘familiar strangers’.

Landscapes

The Landscapes collection captures the world of Sensing; one of pure pattern, theme and feel.

This is the world before words and before learning to focus more on people.

It’s a world of pure background, one of all other-no self; the flip-side of a state of all self-no other which is also experienced by those who process in a mono-track style and, hence, lack any consistent experience of a simultaneous sense of self and other.

In a state of all other-no self, one becomes one with the background, the rustle of leaves, the spaces between objects, the movement of dust particles in a stream of light, the feel of rose petals, the flow of air currents normally unseen to those who tune into the foreground and lose these things.

Neoteric

The Neoteric collection is reflective of being a logical thinker, a systematician.

I have dreams of non-verbal interactions with dreamscape surroundings or backgrounds that are pure pattern, theme and feel.

But I also have ‘systems dreams’; dreams in which concepts are symbolised very simply in forms, colours, textures and placement in relation to others with ‘lines of connection’, ‘lines of summary’, ‘lines of conclusion’ which sum up the symbolic conceptual explorations.

There’s something musical, mathematical, about the paintings in the Neoteric collection which are worlds about relationships within and between concepts, a sort of summarized, non-verbal psychotherapy or social philosophy, expressed in its simplest form and unmuddied by the ‘personal’, yet so essential, so core, that they perhaps transcend the importance of the ‘personal’ in ‘coming to terms’, organizing thought and feeling, and establishing equilibrium and sense of proportion in relation to experiences and events.

I hope to meet some of you at the exhibition.

Warmly,

Donna Williams *)

autistic author, artist, composer, screenwriter.

http://www.donnawilliams.net