How Art Works

From intergalactic travel to the daily commute, enter this book and be transported to wonderful worlds where art and life intertwine and your ideas of both are upended. Chloe Watfern, a writer, transdisciplinary researcher, and maker, joined two world-leading supported studios to learn about the work of their vibrant collectives of neurodiverse artists.

At Studio A, Thom Roberts paints, photocopies, animates, and performs, inviting us to understand people as trains and trains as people (among other things). Skye-Fox, a.k.a. Katerina the Steampunk Ringmaster, a.k.a. Skye Saxon, creates interconnected universes through soft sculpture, drawing, and storytelling. Lisa Tindall writes her life breathlessly in piles of notebooks, words from which she stitches into a dress that conveys some of her experiences. At Project Art Works, Kate Adams and her son Paul Colley walk familiar and strange places, capturing them on film. A forest of scribbles emerges in an art museum as people meet through graphite and charcoal on paper. Artists and makers like Tim Corrigan, Sharif Persaud, Carl Sexton, and Sam Smith move in and out of the frame, sharing biscuits, paint brushes, and wildernesses.

In this book, written as a personal narrative informed by the latest thinking on neurodiversity and art, Chloe tells a tender and exhilarating story of the social and aesthetic dynamics at Studio A and Project Art Works, places like no other. In journeying alongside the complex and astonishing contemporary artists who work there, the book invites readers to radically reconsider their settled ideas of creativity, disability, and care, while learning about lives devoted to making.