Memory Gardens: Summary findings

SPECIAL NEEDS AND CARE-PROVIDERS- CAN THEY WORK TOGETHER?




Environment of living patterns


An eight year self-organized sculpture Garden project initiated by autistic/dyslexic artists, gardeners and therapists.

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The garden was set up as a way of building up a memory for simple movements and acts that on their own could appear to educators or care-providers to be nonsensical or un-productive.

In the garden we wanted to create a living practice between all those who visited, whether autistic adults, children, care-professionals or parents. This could act like a note-book that included the gestures of many and allowed them to operate together.

In simple domestic tasks we all create a semblance of a whole and rarely do break down into component parts the actual procedures for making a cup of tea, walking from room to room, stopping mid-track as a thought appears to us, sounding that out through a walk in the park or a casual chat between appointments.

We wanted Memory Gardens to be such a place of incidental meetings. An informal pause-gap that could mean many different things to different people and whose joint meaning was adapted in an on-going way according to small acts that in various ways affected one another.

This is why we chose to begin and remain always with the small acts that were significant at each moment to those present. We wanted to use what was readily at hand and we have witnessed again and again how manipulation or attention to seemingly unobvious materials or stimuli- bricks, pieces of wood, random sounds that come and go in an outdoor habitat and the general movements though which people go from place to place in a given context gradually build up a depth of traces that becomes in time a shared and recognizable space. This is known not as a repetition of sameness but through minor adjustments according to circumstance, mood and sliding interactions which in another context could appear or come to mean aloneness, fixity, obsession.

We have seen that the practice of seemingly repetitious acts- making tea, placing nuts in known positions for the squirrels, placing bricks in arrangements on the ground, making sequences of colored marks on cloth, walking from here to there and back again, create an accumulation in a shared space that makes these acts responsive and minutely adaptive to many other simultaneous acts. Gradually people begin to respond and tune in to the same triggers and diverse attentions may become loosely coordinated though not obviously generated by any one directive. Together a kind of dance emerges that could not be taken apart and if done so would lead inevitably back to the singular diagnosis of repetitive insignificant autistic acts that would then seem to need to be limited according to rules of appropriateness.
What we have witnessed over many years in the garden is that a context of significance plays out and becomes realizable over time. That a single act caught in a single frame and interpreted as diagnostic criteria may be one “take” but it is not the whole story. That the meaning of an act is never anything other than the situation in which it evolves.
Gestures need time to come into something that then adapts and so comes into something else. They must play out in order to interact and notice themselves changing. They can do this only in a living context where there is no ultimate goal or agenda for achievement but more the informal holding of a loose framework capable of being responsive at many different levels of sensitivity because the framework is only ever viable in all the small acts happening at the time.
This we believe is what an ecology is all about. People on the autistic spectrum go through many different levels of awareness- of integration and dispersal within the course of days, minutes, seconds. We do not find it useful to categorize some of these states as functional and others as dysfunctional, because we have seen in the small and un-integrated dispersed states, when someone is non-verbal, where their body is not contained or still, where they are hyper-alert or introverted, as being receptive states that can bring about high levels of sensitivity and minute interactions with an environment. That environment in turn informs and harmonizes the overall state of that person but this occurs gradually through every act and its adjustment. These acts may later integrate at a more recognizable level, in art-work, empathies built out of an awareness of the gestures of others, and a sense of self-reflection but when and if that occurs, is not for us to determine. All we can do is to create the conditions for a receptive and accepting environment where every gesture matters because they are tangents of a person who is being affected in some way.
Perhaps more than we acknowledge we need to dissipate and let go of goal orientated functions from time to time in order to know that we are in a shared living space and to come up with new and unexpected arrangements for such living and joint recognition. This will lead to a genuine sense of shared pleasure rather than to a one at a time specified duty; a duty which is not always so intelligent because it does not join up one persons’ duties with the next. Peoples` sense of duty, correctness and doing the right thing often comes up against one another and are set at loggerheads because they are operating in different frames of reference that exclude one another.

The project at Legard Road Memory Gardens has been about questioning the categories we find ourselves in- as Care-giver/care-receiver to work out in a practical and limited setting how that line may be softened and re-worked.



Ruth Solomon
Coordinator

Dec 2008


Future initiatives:
We would like to open up a discussion about how our findings may be able to inform approaches to living arrangements in various educational settings and for care providers.



We would particularly like to hear from Action For Children who over the past eight years, have hosted our initiative. We feel it is therefore of primary importance to keep a dialogue open with them.
We would like to thank Action For Children for allowing our Practical Research project to continue - which in the year of 2008 has been undertaken in conjunction with Goldsmiths College Research Architecture.

For more information contact: yellruthtoday@yahoo.co.uk