Flow Unlocked is a collaborative knowledge exchange project which highlights the importance of relationships to autistic people's mental health and quality of life. The intense sensitivity with which autistic people relate to the world is rarely recognised, let alone celebrated. Our Flow Unlocked group have been reflecting on the breadth
Flow Unlocked is a collaborative knowledge exchange project which highlights the importance of relationships to autistic people's mental health and quality of life. The intense sensitivity with which autistic people relate to the world is rarely recognised, let alone celebrated. Our Flow Unlocked group have been reflecting on the breadth of personal and sensory relationships that have sustained them before and during the pandemic, as well as those they have missed. These reflections are revealed through poetry, photography, drawing and film.
We are a collaborative; Georgia Pavlopoulou, UCL Psychologist, autism researcher & neurodiversity advocate; Jon Adams, neurodivergent artist, polymath, Synaesthete and mental health Champion and Briony Campbell, artist, facilitator and project manager. Georgia's work on autistic mental health and relationships is at the root of Flow Unlocked.
In Spring 2020, we began a six month autistic-led consultation process with autistic community consultants, artists and UCL staff during which we established our mission and methodology. Based on this process, in Autumn 2020 invited autistic East Londoners to join creative writing workshops and explore their relationships with place, people, objects and nature. As a group we built a safe space to share perspectives and write poetry on relationships, and the effects of lockdown. Briony and Jon made visual works inspired by participant’s words and the collaborative process. These works were developed and honed in response to regular feedback from our workshop participants. We are also investigating the questions of co-authorship and representation inherent to our process.
Flow Unlocked is supported by UCL Culture’s Trellis programme.
To join our conversation please come to a Flow Unlocked event soon.
We aim to create honest and compelling art inspired by the ways in which autistic people relate to the communities and environments around them, and to question the issues of representing another’s narrative through art.
Our goal is to inspire a sensitive approach to research and to communicate with education and mental health practitione
We aim to create honest and compelling art inspired by the ways in which autistic people relate to the communities and environments around them, and to question the issues of representing another’s narrative through art.
Our goal is to inspire a sensitive approach to research and to communicate with education and mental health practitioners, researchers, artists, autistic people and undiagnosed people, and the general public the ways in which autistic people relate to the environments and communities around them. We want to ensure that research has real life impact and is truly emancipatory to the people involved. Together we are tackling damaging stereotypes about autistic people and celebrating autistic narratives.
Jon Adams is a polymath artist working cross-platform with image, poetry, sound, performance and spoken word. His work references synaesthesia, autism, dyslexia, autobiography, science and hidden metaphor, resulting in unique visual perspectives of systemizing history, time and place.
His national artist profile includes commissions for
Jon Adams is a polymath artist working cross-platform with image, poetry, sound, performance and spoken word. His work references synaesthesia, autism, dyslexia, autobiography, science and hidden metaphor, resulting in unique visual perspectives of systemizing history, time and place.
His national artist profile includes commissions for U.K. Parliament, London2012, received Wellcome Trust, Arts Council England & Leverhulme grants and has worked alongside Sir Peter Brook, Royal Academy and the Autism Research Centre Cambridge.
He campaigns for wider recognition, equity and understanding of Neurodivergent Culture within the arts as ‘Flow Observatorium’. He actively promotes research into suicide in autism, mental health of artists and dismantling barriers to inclusion and participation.
Jon on FlowUnlocked:
My role in Flow Unlocked was as an autist-artist translator; to provide an autistic focal point, inhabiting both camps of researcher and artist. I also led the poetry workshops, providing a peer-led safe space for autistic people to feel more comfortable and thus allow them to create freely. In making my work I translated what our co-creators said, using their words as inspiration for the extended visual metaphor of Covid Corvids. Lived experience is key to creating a fully immersive, safe, and exciting creative environment. This is why projects like Flow Unlocked are so important; it is vital for Neurodivergent people to receive peer support in order for them to thrive, and the outcomes speak for themselves to this point.
Photo credit: Portsmouth Grammar School.
Briony Campbell is a photographer, filmmaker and creative facilitator. She creates visual stories about intimate relationships, intercultural relations, social integration, and loss. Through participatory art methodologies she aims to amplify the diversity of voices, which are crucial to building inclusive societies.
Her work has been awar
Briony Campbell is a photographer, filmmaker and creative facilitator. She creates visual stories about intimate relationships, intercultural relations, social integration, and loss. Through participatory art methodologies she aims to amplify the diversity of voices, which are crucial to building inclusive societies.
Her work has been awarded, exhibited and published internationally, and she collaborates with academic institutions such as UCL, Kent University, Birmingham University. As a facilitator Briony works collaboratively with underrepresented groups and subjects.
Project examples: Documentary project on British+African families in East Africa; a collaboration with her father in the last months of his life; A film about differing belief systems within close relationships; Mentoring terminally ill people in a Birmingham hospice to make their own films. Briony has been funded by Arts Council England.
See more at: www.brionycampbell.com
Georgia was awarded with a PhD from UCL in 2019, examining the relationships of autistic and non-autistic siblings, and then went on to a post-doc at UCL looking at personalised care in sleep management with autistic adolescents and sleep research priorities of autistic adults.
Georgia is a Lecturer based at UCL, Department of Psychology
Georgia was awarded with a PhD from UCL in 2019, examining the relationships of autistic and non-autistic siblings, and then went on to a post-doc at UCL looking at personalised care in sleep management with autistic adolescents and sleep research priorities of autistic adults.
Georgia is a Lecturer based at UCL, Department of Psychology and Human Development teaching Psychological aspects of counselling and is lead autism workforce trainer at Anna Freud Centre. She is the founder of the Group for Research in Relationships in Neurodiversity.
She is passionate working with multidisciplinary teams, experts by experience and scholar activists in community-based mental health research. Georgia is using a combination of behavioural, phenomenological and participatory techniques together with a developmental approach to understand social determinants of autistic mental health through autistic people's personal accounts (stress, belonging, loneliness, low mood, family experiences).
Georgia is committed to creative participatory health and educational research, co-producing work with community members. Georgia has been leading national and international Short Courses for mental health practitioners who work in educational and NHS systems with YP with atypical development, funded by Health England Education. Georgia is passionate about working with marginalized groups, service users, scholar activists and Trusts to facilitate service transformation and advance mental health practice through better cross agency collaboration and better service user participation.
Copyright © 2023 FlowUnlocked - All Rights Reserved.
Powered by GoDaddy