Doodling Not Doomscrolling

Now, Helen, I've seen the benefit of your own practice in your understanding of yourself and the world around you as both a creative and a late diagnosed autistic person.

And as someone who's currently going through a bit of a confusing time myself with regards to my own identity, particularly in the run up to my wedding next year.

I'm keen to learn more about who I am.

The main way that I've seen you use your art to explore your identity is through your daily graphic art diaries that you create and publish online on your website.

We will be linking those in the show notes.

But for the purposes of the podcast, here's a little description.

Each day is contained on a sheet of A5 white paper with the date printed at the top, like you would see at a school book, and there's a mixture of handwritten text and visuals throughout.

The text is generally a reflection of Helen's day or an event or mood.

And the pictures are things like nature scenes, books, buildings, food and places.

There's mentions of Helen's favourite football team, Sheffield United, in both the formations and their scores.

Audiobooks and podcasts that Helen's been listening to, as well as haikus, words of the day and drawings, mostly in black and white.

And it all just links together beautifully.

Oh, thank you.

And so by doing these diaries, you've talked about how you've gone through a process of creative becoming, which is a term I haven't come across before.

Can you tell us a bit about creative becoming and how you came to it through your artistic practice?

Yeah, so it's a relatively new term to me as well.

Creative becoming is the concept that is rooted in feminist theory.

So the theorists like Hegel, Deleuze or Butler refer to becoming as the ongoing process of formation.

So it's the idea that identity is always in flux and is changing and Creative becoming adds on to this, and this suggests that the process generates something new, so there's a transformation.

It's the idea that identity is not only changing, but it's transforming into something unexpected.

Okay, I think I'm with you there.

So since the age of 13, my life was narrated through the clinical diagnosis and clinical language of being anorexic.

So that's how I understood myself and it's how I understood my behaviours.

And then I, 25 years later, got diagnosed at the age of 38 as being autistic.

And it really made me question my own identity and I used my art practice to work through some of those issues and to reclaim my own personal agency.