During the final presentation, I presented three(ish) outcomes: linocut illustrations, two books proposals, and digital illustrations:

The most important feedback that I received was that there was a possibility for a wider reach for this type of project. Perhaps whatever I produced could be workshop or a means of art therapy. Perhaps it could be a book of resources. The whole process was fairly therapeutic for me to put together, so how could I share that? How could I make this more than a story?

Going forward, I want to ask how not to just make educational materials, but how to also make systems for people with special needs.

Once I had a series of images, I decided to assemble two ‘books’, one that was just the comprised of linocut prints on the 2mm clear acrylic, and another that involved those prints as well as warped versions of those prints and words.

I took some of the pieces of the writing that I had done and put them into a file that would match the the size of the clear acrylic pages to ultimately print on clear vinyl to then overlay on the acrylic pages. The words would be clear and their background would be black such that the words would be a portal into the fractured spaces themselves when you encountered the book as a whole.

I also put pictures of my prints into illustrator in order to create some solid stickers of them. Ultimately I wanted to do this so that I could have some images that I could cut up, so that the rooms could ‘shatter’ on some pages.

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In the end, the book prototype ended up being a bit of a failure in a couple of different ways. For the pages that were all text, my stickers were large and difficult to apply. As a result, they left a lot of bubbles when they were applied on the clear acetate. Too the actual ‘pages’ that I printed on directly ended up being a bit sticky because of the fact that my water based ink could not fully dry as it didn’t absorb into the clear acrylic.

As a result, when people flipped through them, they got a lot of ink on their fingers and were less incentivized to read the actual text. Pages stuck together. I also assembled the pages with string, which ended up just falling apart on me.

However, as objects, I thought the books were quite beautiful. They created insecure illusions of spaces, and because of the clear acrylic, they could stand.

Here are some of the images that I captured in the studio:

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The shadows ended up creating a beautiful warmed impression of all of the images together, like a watermark that warped with different perspectives. As images, I think they are a successful testament to memory of spaces.

Additionally, to apply these images, I worked with the format of a book, in the idea of a page of a comic to create this sort of ‘all at once’ feature:

I thought both of these attempts to serialize my prints ultimately did something similar: they created semi-physical doll houses of spaces that a ‘reader’ could navigate and populate from room to room. Though these spaces were created to ultimately tell the story of my own brother, I think the way that I displayed them invites the viewing to come in and populate them with their own stories.

I decided that for one of my outcomes for the illustrations in my reflections on my personal relationship with my brother, I should investigate what happened when I put writing on the subject in immediate proximity to the images of the house that I had linocut.

In order to do this, I would have to write. Throughout the project I had been calling my parents to talk about Matthew, but I hadn’t really sat down to archive my own memory. First, I wrote down all of the memories that were associated with the pictures I had unearthed in the iCloud drive and tried to segment memory roughly according to year:

Then, I went through and tried to convey my own thoughts on this process/what I am trying to do by using him as my subject in Investigate:

Last Friday’s Lecture about memory was significant for me because it made me encounter these things. —personal history as a way to encounter storytelling and the brain. 

Having a brother like Matthew is probably one of the most important forces in my life. His has been the story that has defined me, but it has been very difficult to tell. Perhaps it isn’t a huge part of my identity when I am not in New Orleans, but I will always be his sister. 

It is strange to try and tell the story of what it is to be attached to a brother like Matthew when he is not a part of my story right now. Matthew lives at home in New Orleans, and we have lived apart for some years. There is a narrative guilt to the flavor that he gives my perspective and to the exoticized metaphorical interpretation of how I think his brain works. Am I using him for the story? Capitalizing on him. 

The older I get, the more I see the shells of his diagnosis in us, all of us: the members of his family, but that is exactly the problem. In an attempt to tell the story of people with autism, we often end up telling the stories of the people and spaces around them. It is more digestible than the story of the person themselves, and that person becomes a logical reference for the stories that we explain away about ourselves. 

It seemed Matthew never quite trusted the notion of object permanence. When things would leave his line of sight, it was never guaranteed that they would come back. He took up a role as a protector of the physical universe, placing the burden on himself to make sure that he would maintain the same routines, so as not to create a ripple in the universe such that everything would fall apart. Occasionally, he would interact with us to reassure his notion of a communal reality of our home. But sometimes, things would fall apart or be washed away. To him, it had the gravity of the actual collapse of the universe. 

Matthew was the reason I studied neurobiology. His unique way of thinking was the subject of my college essay. But since making that formal leap into my understanding of his brain, I have spent less time with him. And the only way to know/help Matthew directly is to be with him. 

I want to say that I have an emotional connection to Matthew, but I am not sure that is what he cares about. Being close to Matthew requires an attempt to understand how he works, and realizing that signs of what we want for validation of a mutual understanding/love may only be for us. There is a scene in the Curious Case of the Dog in the Nightime in which the protagonist, an autistic boy, runs away from his father’s house and reunites with his mother. The mom wants to hug him, but the boy does not want to be touched. It is much the same with Matthew: there is a call and response nature to the “I love you” and the ‘conversations’ that we have together as a family. He will answer, but he does so strategically. It’s kind of like wearing that Christmas sweater that you hate, but you wear it because your mom really loves it and expects it of you. You want to make her happy, but you will never care about the sweater itself. Maybe you just wear it so she stops bugging you. 

Often, my parents will ask Matthew what he did at school. The social conventions of chatter are hard to break, even when you have raised a largely non-verbal boy for 21 years. Sometimes he will fabricate stories based on one word answers: 

“Matthew how was school?”
“Great day.”

“What did you do today?”
“Dog treats”
“What did you have for lunch”
“Wrap” 

Or sometimes there will be hints of clues 

“What did you do at school today?”
“Pig”
“What color was the pig?”
“Purple.”

There is a certain roulette to the conversations that Matthew will have. As his vocabulary expands. He plays trial and error. 

The other day, I was talking to my dad, and he was going to take my brother to the zoo. I asked my dad what Matthew’s favorite animal was, and my dad said that he really liked the flamingos. 

The favorite animal of the moment was decidedly the flamingo. Matthew was on speaker. 

I asked him what color flamingos were and he said “blue.”

there is a certain performance to the way that we interact with Matthew for each other. This made us laugh. My father responded, “NOOOOOO. What color are flamingos?” changing his intonation to convey the ridiculousness of the answer. Like a pantomime. 

And then Matthew corrected himself. “Pink.”  However, he is 21 year old boy. Of course it is ridiculous that we asked him what color a flamingo was, but he indulged us, and we asked the question because we knew it was one that he could and would verbally answer—to give us a proxy of connection. 

He has given our family a unique lexicon of his responses. I read Family Lexicon by _____, which talks about a similar thing. This internal language/catch phrases carve neural grooves of familiarity. It is an in group-out group thing. The life and history we have is broken by trauma that is linked to a place. 

There is a closeness to my family which does not involve Matthew directly but which is built around him. My mother, my father, and I talk nearly every day. Because our laws of physics were quite different.

When we all lived in the house together, we all were under this unspoken oath that we operated according to slightly different laws of physics than everyone else. Restaurants, vacations, schools, everything that is a struggle for most families was amplified by a thousand because of Matthew. Having people over always required a story, an explanation, for a while, an apology. 

It was a little while after I graduated from high school, and I was back in New Orleans for a winter break, so I was hanging out a lot with some of the people that I grew up with and staying at my parent’s house. My old friends and I would go out to bars quite near mine, and I would offer my parent’s house as a place to stay when we would inevitably come home late and drunk, but I noticed that one of my friends, for whatever reason, didn’t want to stay at my house.

I asked my other friend Ruthie why she didn’t want to say. Ruthie, one of my oldest, best friends, took a sharp breath in, and she said, “Brooke, don’t take this the wrong way…” I looked at her. “What? Just say it.” She continued, “But waking up at your house can be a bit…,” she paused again, “awkward.” 

She didn’t say it was because of Matthew. But that is what was implied. 

It was weird to go to college out of state and to only have to think about myself. 

It’s often weird to think of my parents as people before they were parents—as fun and lighthearted. They are still fun and lighthearted, but there is a guilty sadness to think of what their lives could have been. What worries they wouldn’t have had. Who they would have been. 

All of us agree that we would probably suck a lot more if Matthew wasn’t the way he was. 

And too, to imagine who and what Matthew would have been. Shimmers of ‘normalcy.’

Would he have been gay? Would he have liked sports? Would he have been a trouble maker? 

There is a kindness to Matthew—a self awareness that seems like him and not his autism.

How much is him. And how much is autism. 

Does that distinction matter? How much of that autism is Matthew’s autism. 

How useful is it to know that story if his case is entirely unique? But then again, if we use diagnosis and categorization to developmental disorders do they become that anyway? 

This is the story of a person. Not of autism. 

The relationship my parents want me to have with Matthew verses the ones that we actually have. Even today, whenever Matthew is in the car,

Matthew has stores of information in certain people who he trusts. The conversations do not age, though they do shift from time to time. 

New information is rarely generated in a conversation with Matthew. 

I used to use books as props in a sense as well. 

My story of Matthew is biased because I experience I through my own eyes, and I see him as a reflection of myself and as a standard of measurement against which I measure my family. Our stories will also inevitably merge once more. 

How glamorous it can be to live as a sister of someone who is severely autistic, but to not have to have the constant burden of what happens when things go wrong. 

Matthew is 21 today—he is four years younger than me, but he towers above everyone. 

He and my father probably have the most interesting relationship in our family. 

I can’t claim to know is internal world, but I can just offer an understanding of it.

The life and history we have is broken by trauma that is linked to a place. 

There is a closeness to my family which does not involve Matthew directly but which is built around him. My mother, my father, and I talk nearly every day. Because our laws of physics were quite different.

When we all lived in the house together, we all were under this unspoken oath that we operated according to slightly different laws of physics than everyone else. Restaurants, vacations, schools, everything that is a struggle for most families was amplified by a thousand because of Matthew. Having people over always required a story, an explanation, for a while, an apology. 

Screaming/crying in the middle of the night. Locks on the doors. Guilt.

A certain pageantry to introducing Matthew to someone for the first time. 

One of us had to be at home at all times because Matthew could not be left alone. 

Proximal loneliness. Parallel, and so close but not intersecting. 

But then there is so much love. 

The tandem bike, which is SO embarrassing. The squishy helmet Matthew used to have to wear in the car when he was little because he would bang his head against the seats too often. 

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In the final week of the investigate project, I decided to attempt to push the images of the linocut spaces that I had created even further by applying them in prints. First, I decided to slicing up the images of some of the wet linocuts in photoshop to print with the risograph printer. I liked the idea of the binary representation of space with different colors, and I thought it would work well to show the depth and texture of the watercolor-esque lino prints that I had done.

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I think these experiments may not necessarily lead to direct application in the next project, which will explore a refinement of one of the concepts we investigated in Investigate. I have ultimately decided that the riso printer perhaps will be a media by which I create a zine for its depth of texture and cost-effectiveness. However, color is not something that will ultimately come into this next step of the project.

As for laser cutting, I decided that it would be interesting to create an alternative zine by applying the prints to some pages created by two mm acetate so that they could overlay on each other. So, I created a laser cut file for said pages. Additionally, I initially thought that it could be interesting to apply the prints to a puzzle as well which I would lasercut. However, I decided that this idea seemed a bit too hokey with pre-existing autism imagery (which is the puzzle piece).

Once I had the clear acrylic pages that were proportional to my Linocut blocks for the spaces, I decided I would print the pictures onto some of them directly, but I also wanted to put words and fractured pieces of the images using printing on clear vinyl.

On Friday, the 6th of December, we had a really interesting activity/lecture with an artist who worked in memory. In her process, she would look at old family photographs in order to activate her memories and inspire new work central to her family’s history and sense of identity/lack of sense of identity. She was raised in stories about Africa and the Caribbean, but she was born in London. Our initial family stories are brought into our cannon by our parents’ curation. I am also working from family photographs in order to piece together a narrative/identity that I am not entirely sure of, so bringing an awareness of that bias when looking at our personal timelines was incredibly useful.

After the lecture, we brought this lens of analysis to our own practice in the arts. We were asked to bring in three objects that represent our past, present, and future artistic practice.

Past: Painting, an easel. We were tasked to write about this object.

How do you capture a memory? 

The Easel 

It is metal and cold and temperamental. I looks a little like a minimalist robot. 

It should be still, but sometimes in the middle of a stroke, the critical horizontal edge would squeak and dramatically fall, placing the image it cradled in peril.

Sometimes I’d catch the painting. Sometimes it would fall forward on the grey concrete floor and leave a ghost of itself on the wrong surface, ruining its intended surface. 

I loved the room, but hated the easels—the angles and hinges always worked against me. It was the exact opposite of the oil paint, which was warm and liquid and pliable, comfortable on my fingers. I loved the smell of serpentine and how the smell diffused throughout the big angular room. 

Whereas a blot on the easel would always prove peril. Was it a new paint stain or an old one? Wet paint that continued to be dangerous or a mark of a previous mistake. 

I remember setting up the easel when I painted Sawyer. When starting a new painting in the studio, I’d have to drag the easel out of the corner, which was difficult as the heaviness was distributed awkwardly—almost randomly. It was made more difficult by the fact that it was about the same height that I was. Like a thin, cold assistant that would occasionally act up. I was always nervous to interact with the easel.The hinges were pinchers of death, and injuries to  the hand are the worst thing that can happen to a painter, but I was especially nervous then. 

The easel and the masonite surface protected me from him but also to obscure him so I had to peak around it. It was difficult to use it as a recording object 

Present: Linocut–we were tasked to create a timeline to follow an abject related to our current practice.

Future: Book–I brought a book by Tom Gauld to represent the future of my artistic practice, and we were meant to present our relationship to it. I see the future of my practice to continue to explore many different media. Currently, the media that I am exploring is linocut, but I will continue to be narrative driven. Ultimately, I would like to collaborate with writers to build a world to write a story and force myself to write more, but it seems like a larger jump from my current practice.

In order to get excited about realizing some of the images for the children’s book outcome, I knew I wanted to make exciting interiors, so I searched on Pinterest for some ideas for textures and color palettes.

To make one of the key images, a boy looking up at his furniture that has floated to the ceiling, which was in my storyboard, I used a combination of photos and illustration inspiration to render the final result.

I found the final result aesthetically pleasing, but I found myself a bit wrapped up in the physics of the room–whether fabric would have fallen off the bed etc and onto the floor. Also, I considered text going in the bottom right-hand corner, but I didn’t write anything final.

For the second key image that I wanted to complete, wanted to use an entirely different perspective/scale, so I researched birds eye illustrations of houses and modified them to look like my own.

In this image, I now imagine it being a double spread of a full neighborhood on the left side. Text would go on the column on the displayed page to the right. But once more, I am not sure what the exact copy would be.

I thought it was a worthwhile exercise to put the effort into making these spreads in order to test my patience for digital illustration as well as the effectiveness of the metaphor. I think these two images have convinced me that this allegorical interpretation of autism has potential. However, they also gave me a taste of how long it takes to produce them. With breaks, I was able to finish the two illustrations over a period of two days. They were long days, though.

Though I like the concept, I am not sure I could complete an entire Children’s book for the final project. However, I will keep the idea in the arsenal.

In addition to making the illustrations specifically for the children’s book idea, I started working through some rough sketches of illustrations for how I feel about my personal relationship with my brother based on all of the recent reflection that I have done.

These last two sketches, I didn’t fully complete. Too, I am not sure what their function is on their own at the moment. They probably best exist alongside text describing these phenomenon, which I have yet to write.

On Tuesday the 3rd of December, I had another discussion with Mariana in which I discussed the direction of my work. We continued to talk about the spaces that were created by the linocut prints and the possibilities of their perceived scale. What is the difference between experiencing the linocut prints if they are on a wall, where they would feel very small, verses on a page, where they could take up the entire space.

I started to think about what could happen to create spaces/panels when putting the print rooms next to each other. How could they bleed into each other? How could those connections create new spaces.

Too, I started to realize that the works were perhaps becoming less about my own brother and more about the spaces that happen to be of psychological interest. How can spaces/our memory/visual interpretation of spaces reflect our psychology and perception.

Mariana pointed me in the direction of Peter Zumthor’s book ‘Atmospheres’, which addresses the psychology of spaces.

My prints are also bridging the gap between fine art and illustration, but Mariana pointed out that there are many artists who keep both as their practice, namely Paula Rego. She is an interesting artist because the communication of narrative goes both ways: she is inspired by classic folklore, and she also illustrates to accompany stories. He work offers a dark reinterpretation of narrative with a feminist twist, but her stories are largely figure based.

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I like the idea of using classic narrative imagery as a scaffolding for a visual reinterpretation of story to create images that can have lives that stand alone as well as that accompany text.

This has clarified for me the space that I want to occupy with my work going forward. I am happy to let my work sit next to a story, but I also want to leave the spaces that I create up for reinterpretation.

Over the weekend of the end of November, I found myself consumed with making more linocut blocks of my childhood house to tell another component of the story of the psychology of spaces. I liked too thinking about spaces as a fixed lexicon in addition to our verbal means of communication.

Spaces hold memory and psychology, as did the physical process of sitting and carving these spaces into linoleum. Drawing from pictures of my childhood home that I would look at on my computer screen, I used black and red Sharpie to draw linear versions of the rooms on to the block. Then I would carve and print. It is interesting in that in building a positive image, I was essentially destroying a block piece by piece, leaving its shattered contents on the ground. Additionally, I destroyed my original drawing in the process to create this permanent stamp.

Searching for reference photos was quite emotionally intense–in order to find images of the rooms that I wanted to depict, I had to go very far back into the photos app. I am fortunate in that all my family’s photos from our collective iCloud account all synch up. Looking back into these photos is like dipping into a collective memory bank for my family which semi-arbitrarily starts existing with the acquisition of my dad’s first iPhone. The memory broadens from different perspectives as we slowly get more apple devices. My brother even ends up taking several selfies.

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Though I worked from observation, the stamps themselves became rather distorted by my own hand and the layers of memory which make an attempt to stitch them together. As a result, the process of trying to tell the story of my brother is also becoming a story about me. Intuitively this makes sense, but in terms of clinical psychology, it also has roots in the broad autism phenotype, which I mentioned in previous posts.

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I am not the first artist to imbue their psychology into a physical space, as Vincent Van Gogh famously did in his painting of his bedroom in Arles from 1889. However, he uses much more color in order to give the viewer hints into his psychology, whereas mine is much more black and white.

In the end, I also love the surprise of the prints themselves. As with each print and each different paper, the uniform stamp leaves a slightly different trace.

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I think the next step is to try to create narratives with these spaces. I will find my favorites from the huge batch, perfect and imperfect alike. Often, I prefer the prints that are not perfect as they show that even in a fixed idea of a space, there are still flaws.