ELINOR ROWLANDS: STIMMING AS ARTISTIC METHODOLOGY

ELINOR ROWLANDS: STIMMING AS ARTISTIC METHODOLOGY
MONDAY 20 JULY 2026 - 12:30-12:55
JOHNSON AUDITORIUM

My proposed presentation explores the intersections of neuroqueerness, biodivergence, autism, and artistic practice through material, sensory, and ecological approaches to making. Drawing on themes of darkness, liminality, porousness, and relationality, the work considers how creative practice can open alternative modes of perception and knowledge beyond neurotypical and anthropocentric frameworks.

The presentation will reflect on art-making as both a personal and collective process, examining how bodies, environments, and materials co-produce meaning, and how creative spaces might support more fluid, interdependent ways of being and understanding. It also attends to experiences of wetness, leakage, and seepage; tears, crying, and sensory overflow as both material and affective states. These are considered from a neuroqueer and autistic perspective, moving from hyper-sensitivity toward an engagement with ecological systems in which permeability, overflow, and dissolution are not only permitted but generative. In contrast to social systems that often regulate or contain such expressions, the work explores how artistic and ecological contexts might hold space for these forms of embodied excess through autistic lived experience of multiplicity, porousness, and darkness, via the eco-gothic.

PROFILE LINK HERE