Community-Based Process + Socially Engaged Intention
The first stage of this project is very much about building the foundation. Over six workshops, I am working with two non-verbal autistic men to begin gathering material for a larger body of work. Three of the workshops have now been delivered.
This stage is about spending time together, experimenting, noticing what emerges, and allowing trust to build. It needs to be community-based. Without that shared space and relationship, there would be no real material to work with.
My intention is to make a collaborated work that is displayed in a book. The idea to explore a concertina book format came through conversations with Corrinna Krause, whose experience in bookbinding opened up that possibility. As soon as we discussed it, I felt it suited the direction of the project. For now, though, the focus is less on the final structure and more on creating the content that will eventually shape it.
These workshops are not just activities to fill time. They are a space for making, responding, repeating, and paying attention. Every mark matters. I am observing patterns, preferences, gestures, and rhythms. I am learning how each man works, how he communicates through materials, and how collaboration can happen in ways that feel genuine rather than imposed.
This part of the project has to be slow and grounded. It is about presence before presentation.
While this stage is about gathering material and building trust, it is also laying the groundwork for something that asks for recognition. The longer-term aim is to shift how families, carers, and institutions see the men — not as people being occupied, but as people with a voice and an artistic presence.
Voice does not mean speech. It can be movement, repetition, colour, pressure, refusal, return. This early phase is about noticing those forms of communication and taking them seriously.
Right now, the work is relational. It is careful. It is attentive.
The community-based process is essential because it creates the conditions for everything that follows. Without it, there is no integrity in the outcome.
The intention is socially engaged — to shift perception and create recognition — but it begins here, in the shared space of making.
Nicola Neate 