Alice Kell

I believe strongly in the power of using drawing as a thinking method rather than a final outcome. I've employed my skills as an illustrator to record body language and movements of neurodiverse participants. I used this as a method not only to record workshops I've run, but as a resource to understand external processing behaviours of a variety of neurodivergent participants.

My project aims to empower dyslexic students who are neglected by the school system. This project was inspired by my own experience of education as someone with dyslexia. I have been running workshops in secondary schools across London that encourages participants, aged twelve to sixteen to visualise their dyslexia as a hybrid animal. These outcomes are going into a publication and activity pack that will be circulated back to the participating schools. This project aims to establish community among dyslexic students and educate their neurotypical peers.

I worked closely with the special educational needs (SEN) members of staff at each of the schools to select the students for the workshop. The contents of the publication and activity pack are entirely created by the participants. I merely facilitated the workshop and gave them prompts. These prompts included questions like, are you an auditory learner? This helped them along to define characteristics of their dyslexia in a visual way. I also sat in on one on one lessons with certain participants to record their body language through drawing. This helped me understand the participants relationship with education better.

This is an ongoing project that is aiming to be finished for September 2022.

Initially my practice addressed the lack of neurodiverse representation in the Wellcome Collection. After working closely with representatives from The Wellcome on this, I was invited to create a workshop for their staff based on my experience of accessing the archives as someone with dyslexia. The workshop was held in The Wellcome Collection and invited the staff to 'read' the space through a dyslexic lens. Each animation depicts a task that invited participants to employ an aspect of dyslexic reasoning.

The framework of the workshop was influenced by the book The Dyslexic Advantage. Not only has this book been important to my own understanding of dyslexia over the years, it outlines four fundamental skills dyslexic people are better at than those who are neurotypical. It uses the acronym MIND, which stands for Material, Interconnected, Narrative and Dynamic reasoning. This felt like a good framework for the workshop because it celebrated what dyslexic people do well but also would make participants reflect on how academic spaces can be excluding to people with dyslexia.

A group of Royal College of Art and PhD students from Kings College London and I are working together to develop a framework to facilitate a knowledge exchange between the cardiovascular health researchers and British Heart Foundation fundraisers. Our outcome will be a workshop that enables scientists to visually describe their journey into science using handmade stamps. These outcomes will then be shown to secondary schools close to the hospital. This collaboration has been an incredibly rich and informative exercise in how to facilitate a multidirectional conversation across different disciplines.

In collaboration with: Daniela Perez, Andrea Sisó, & Amy Hang

Special thanks to: Hannah Green

In order to celebrate all the amazing work that has come out of the Neurodiverse Society this academic year, I have made a limited edition publication. It includes work from Visualising Neurodiversity, Service Design for Autism and Across RCA.

Available for purchase via RCA show 2022