Laura Aldridge. Kitted Vehicle (Detail), 2018.

A Meeting Point: A New Language

Nicola White

Words can only do so much. In writing about the work of Artlink’s Ideas Team over years, I’ve found myself reaching, stretching to describe encounters that are beyond conventional language, encounters that are based on different, and arguably deeper, forms of communication; communication embedded in the senses of the body, or in the shared language of making. In all the pieces of writing that follow, artists and arts workers articulate their experiences of working with people with complex needs. The experiences themselves involve few words, but these writings and the accompanying photographs speak volumes.

For over a decade now, The Ideas Team has worked with some of the most marginalized individuals in Scotland, people with profound cognitive disabilities. They have worked in a unique spirit of enquiry, pairing artists with individuals, involving the care workers who have intimate knowledge of that individual. The aim is to find connection, to work out what might engage that person, to give that person some agency in what happens during these encounters, knowing that they often have no agency in other parts of their lives. As Alison Stirling writes in her essay, “… almost every detail of their world [is] determined by someone else, such as what activities they get involved in, where they sit, when they eat and sleep etc.”

The work of the Ideas Team is informed at all stages by the interests of the people they work with and has resulted in the creation of a wide range of artworks and experiences – customized shower gels with the smell of dandelions or horses, a ‘sensorium’ of cosmic light and sound manipulated by a simple joystick, a vibrating pillar containing a library of favourite sounds. Strange and beautiful as these physical manifestations are, much of the valuable work occurs in the ephemeral moment, the meeting point between the artist and the individual, in shared moments of euphoria and quiet understanding. Artist Laura Spring writes of such a moment –simple yet profound: “he looks up, his eyes lock with mine and for a moment we’re there together.”

Being in the world together, as humans with all our differences, using art as the bridge to be there together in a fuller way. This is the heart of the Idea Team’s important work.

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Nicola White
Is a writer and a former curator and documentary maker. Her novel In the Rosary Garden won the Dundee International Book Prize and her short fiction has been widely published and broadcast on Radio 4. She often collaborates with visual artists and arts organisation, contributing texts to a range of publications.