Melanie Hadley is in her final year at Birmingham City University studying Textile Design.  She is  researching for her dissertation and is focusing on the benefits of art with children with disabilities, people on the autistic spectrum and adults.  She asked me some questions about how art has affected my life and about my ARTism.  Here’s our interview:
MELANIE HADLEY
1) Where does your type of autism fall on the spectrum?
DONNA WILLIAMS

Hi Melanie.  I’m diagnosed with autism.  Autism is different for each person.  Mine has included gut, immune, metabolic, mood, anxiety, compulsive disorders and visual/verbal and body agnosias (meaning blindness, face blindness, meaning deafness and difficulty processing body feedback).  Added to this were attachment complications and significant environmental issues.  I moved from 90% meaning deaf at age 9 to only 50% meaning deaf and gained functional speech aged 9-11.  My IQ in my 20s was just under 70 but I think this was due to agnosias making any test seeking visual and verbal processing invalid as a measurement of my intelligence.  I have some significant sensory perceptual and cognitive processing issues but I’m extremely well adapted.  As an author, artist, singer-songwriter, screenwriter, autism consultant and lecturer, obviously I can function in many ways at a high level.  In other areas I sometimes still resemble some people with learning disability or brain injury.
MELANIE HADLEY
2) How do you believe creating art has helped you deal with life situations?
DONNA WILLIAMS

Utterly.  But as a child I didn’t demonstrate any such abilities or they were so primal that people didn’t recognise them as art.  So I’d drop stones to hear their different tones, walk on gravel like I was playing a symphony, play the air to music I was hearing in my mind, dance with air currents I could see, move my head to shift shadow, shine, reflections, color patterns, line myself up with lines of symmetry, mold my body into the forms of statues, rub my face and body on textures and surfaces… to me that’s all art or ARTism but nobody recognised ‘an artist’.  And Exposure Anxiety combined with being a very solitary personality meant there was no point creating anything lasting which could serve as a bridge via which others could know or ‘invade’ my world.  So in that sense the move from ‘autism’ to ‘artism’ took until I was less emotionally autistic before I could dare expression through art in more conventionally recognised ways.  From there it really helped me express my reality not just to others but more importantly to draw unknown knowing into conscious awareness of who I was, how I thought, felt, perceived.
MELANIE HADLEY
3) What are the benefits of using art to you?
DONNA WILLIAMS
Self awareness, connection with the world, a sense of communicative equality, making peace with the world.

MELANIE HADLEY
4) What are your views on Interactive art in galleries and public places? Do you believe you had enough access to such activities, if not do you believe you could have benefited from them?
DONNA WILLIAMS
I got interactive art in cemetaries, in buildings and hotels and their architecture, certainly not in galleries. As someone with visual agnosias, I needed to touch paintings and sculptures, feel how the bits came together as a meaningful and cohesive whole and galleries won’t allow that at all.  Either you’re physically blind or hands off and with visual agnosias you can see but have no idea what you see or how the parts are connected until you physically traces them.  So there are far more accessible ways to experience ARTism than galleries.

MELANIE HADLEY
5) Are there any methods or resources that are particulary helpful to a child and artist with autism?
DONNA WILLIAMS
Forget the word autism. Ask are their ways to help people without verbal speech through arts, people with visual and verbal agnosias, people trapped by mood, anxiety, compulsive disorders, people isolated by attachment disorders which may be underpinned by significant sensory-perceptual deficits… those are better questions.  And yes, there are.  On a case by case basis.  Some people need to explore sounds, textures, colors and contrasts before ‘art’.  Some need to see through their hands, feel through their body, speak through their actions, use art to harmonise their chaos or dialogue with it, to connect or to explore.

MELANIE HADLEY
6) What barriers has having autism created in you life? Concerning art and other aspects of life.

DONNA WILLIAMS

Exposure Anxiety created huge obstacles as one struggles to dare exist… there’s a nature avoidance, diversion, retaliation when others draw attention to the person, try to join them directly, so that was a huge obstacle… there were times EA wouldn’t allow me to touch colors so I could only dare draw in grey, times it has banished music which made me feel too much, years and years it allowed me only to watch others do art, touch art materials whilst it wouldn’t free me up to do so or only be able to do so provided I destroyed whatever evidence of my expression which had come out.  That’s hideous but its a self protection response gone mad and we call it ‘autistic’ but I call it what it is, Exposure Anxiety.

Other parts of my autism, like having bipolar since age 3, made me wonderfully expressive, creative, unstoppable.

And visual and verbal agnosias gave me wonderful abilities to use my hands to see, to hear, to speak, so I sculpt my paintings, I gesture like a dancer, I see movement musically… those are great gifts and if that’s ‘my autism’ then autism has also given me great gifts as an artist.

Even the health issues like gut, immune, metabolic disorders which are linked to the information processing issues that are part of my autism … art has been a wonderful, essential distraction from condition-as-self to always remember I’m more than my health issues.

Thanks for the interview and all the best in your work.

Warmly,

Donna Williams, Dip Ed, BA Hons.
Author, artist, singer-songwriter, screenwriter.
Autism consultant and public speaker.

http://www.myspace.com/nobodynowherethefilm
http://www.donnawilliams.net
http://www.aspinauts.com