5.5.07
To Whom It May Concern,
This is a letter of recomendation concerning Iris Taribo Ramon who has worked at “Memory Gardens Autistic Sculpture Project” for the last three years at the Sunday Youth Club.
Iris has a capacity to learn on the job through the dynamic interplay that she supports and encourages between herself and autistic children who are mainly non-verbal. In this job you must be able to combine an indepth focus in relation to the needs, signals and interests of individual young children with an awareness of what is happening in the entire space; the general tone and mood of all the children and which of the co-workers or other children may at any moment need support.
Working at the Garden Project in this fluid and changeable environment is a highly creative process. Iris with her knowledge and practical involvement in the visual arts, has a strong sense and appreciation of the sheer enjoyment of working and creating moments of contact out of forms which she knows to be fluid and sculptural.
Whether she is making a mobile out of bark and beads for a child who likes to flick things and see them move, or creating a dweling out of bricks and wood for a child who likes to be in the middle of things and then knock down that structure, she adapts her interaction according to the motion of the child at that moment.
I feel that Iris has learnt this way of adaptation very fast- a learning style which can for some people be a challenge to their own sense of planning and preferance for fixed or stable structures. By working with dynamic processes Iris has learnt more deeply about these children and the creative possibilities of Autism then she ever could from books alone. By seeing how things change she has learnt about the valued connection that stays the same and grows from week to week and year to year.
What I feel has been her strongest motivational force is her open heartedness; simply a wish to create links and learn. An openness which allows her to keep challenging her own belief system and to change where this allows the link to continue and deepen.
I have come to see Iris as a real asset to this small Garden project. I will truly miss her presence at the Garden if she should be successful in her application to your college. However I am convinced that such training will deepen what is already a strong potential and comitment in this field of work.
Yours Sincerely,
Ruth Solomon B.A
Co-ordinator
Memory Gardens
Saturday, 21 August 2010
To: Chief Executive of NCH, 2004
Memory Gardens Sculpture Project
10 March 2004
Dear Mr Mead,
We are a small self-help group that is situated no more than a few metres from where you now sit!
We exist because, just over two years ago, staff members at NCH gave us the benefit of the doubt and let us develop a piece of disused land that is owned by themselves and is situated by the side of the legard Family Assessment Unit.
Our project is for Autistic and Dyslexic people, and from this disused land we have created a garden space where we hold weekend clubs and make sculptures and shelters, also running games activities and doing gardening. We also run an educational project on a weekday whereby adults with Aspergers Syndrome train to become Mentors to the younger people who attend the club, and help also with maintenance of the garden.
Our project has now been running for over two years, during which time we have secured various grants and kept a co-operative but non-invasive relationship with NCH.
I am writing to you now because there are two issues which are questioning our on going security as a project, namely :-
a) We need to build toilet facilities if we are not to be dependant on those in the Legard Road Family Centre. This dependency is not an ideal sitation asit can only be an irritation to those working in the Family Centre at the weekend, who have to respond to our buzzing their intercom, asking to be let in to use their toilet. But also because it inhibits who we can invite to become members- so those with more frequent needs for a toilet are, at this cold time of year being excluded (i.e those with weaker bladders!)
We also feel that it must be a difficult situation for the Family Centre and althought they have been generous in allowing us to use their downstairs facilities, we feel that long-term and with our presently increased membership, it is not fair on their privacy.
We propose building our own facilities in an adjoining storeroom where at the moment we keep our tools and thanks to a cold water supply ansd sink, are able to wash our hands. But we need permission to do so. We have put this proposal forward and in theory it was approved, but it has been over a year now, and we have no firm guideline.
b) The second point relates to our right to use this land. At present we are temporary "guests" and NCH bears the rigth to ask us to leave at a month's notice. As our project becomes more established and includes more members, we feel that such a shaky basis is a cause for concern.
If the staff whom we have been dealing with for so long were to change, or conditions beyond our control were to come into effect, we could find ourselves SUDDENLY becoming homeless. Bearing in mind the time it has taken to build up a sense of trust and value for our members, and in view of their overriding need for security, this could be devastating for our members on a deeply personal level.
It is in view of these concerns that I am writing to you.
I would value a meeting with yourself and would certainly be glad to show you or any other representative of NCH around our project when I could explain more fully the spirit of our work in the garden.
I also feel that it is a pity that there is not more of a link in terms of ideas between our artist practitioners and those therapists working in the field of Autism at NCH. I sense that both our project and your organisation would gain a great deal from such a shared platform of discussion.
I look forward to hearing from you at your convenience.
Yours Sincerely,
Ruth Solomon
Founder and Co-ordinator
Memory Gardens Sculpture Project.
To: "The Arsenal in the Community Officer"
Arsenal Stadium, Avenall Road Memory Gardens Sculpture Project
London N5 1BU Legard Road, N5
10 March 2004
Dear Sir/Madam
We are a very small, but gradually increasing self-help project, which is based just around the corner from your stadilu. We run weekend clubs for autistic and dyslexic young people in what used to be adderelict garden adjoining the NCH Family Centre. Indeed we have spent the past two years renovating the land, transforming it from an overgrown, brick and debris-filled ex-garden into a real garden with plants, hers and flowers.
At our weekend clubs, we make large and small-scale sculptures out of natural materials, i.e. old fence posts, washed-up sea shells, recycled materials, brocken bricks. We aloso cook our lunch over a bonfire, occasioanlly all meeting up for an evening barbecue- thus teaching additional skills.
We also run an educational program for adults with hig-functioning autism, who train to become mentors for the younger people who attend our weekend clubs.
Whilst discussing possibilities for future funding, one member suggested approaching your Football Club, as we sometimes hear music and applause from your Stadium.
It is as a result of this discussion that I am now writing to yourselves. We urgently need more funding to pay for a wooden work platform, upon which we could bbuild more sculptures; and to pay for an artist to help us create a greenhouse from bamboo.
We also have increasing and on-going expenses as Spring Approaches, needing to buy more plants. more building materials, and to employ more workers.
We would be grateful for any donation which you would care to make. This could be either a one-off, or monthly payment. Upon discussion with our members, the sum of £200 was suggested.
We would be very grateful for your assistance right now, and would welcome a visit to our site from a representative of your club. I am only too happy to show interested people the garden. I could also send you photos of the garden and the sculptures created in it.
I look forward to hearing from you,
Yours Faithfully,
Ruth Solomon, Founder
Memory Gardens Sculpture Project
London N5 1BU Legard Road, N5
10 March 2004
Dear Sir/Madam
We are a very small, but gradually increasing self-help project, which is based just around the corner from your stadilu. We run weekend clubs for autistic and dyslexic young people in what used to be adderelict garden adjoining the NCH Family Centre. Indeed we have spent the past two years renovating the land, transforming it from an overgrown, brick and debris-filled ex-garden into a real garden with plants, hers and flowers.
At our weekend clubs, we make large and small-scale sculptures out of natural materials, i.e. old fence posts, washed-up sea shells, recycled materials, brocken bricks. We aloso cook our lunch over a bonfire, occasioanlly all meeting up for an evening barbecue- thus teaching additional skills.
We also run an educational program for adults with hig-functioning autism, who train to become mentors for the younger people who attend our weekend clubs.
Whilst discussing possibilities for future funding, one member suggested approaching your Football Club, as we sometimes hear music and applause from your Stadium.
It is as a result of this discussion that I am now writing to yourselves. We urgently need more funding to pay for a wooden work platform, upon which we could bbuild more sculptures; and to pay for an artist to help us create a greenhouse from bamboo.
We also have increasing and on-going expenses as Spring Approaches, needing to buy more plants. more building materials, and to employ more workers.
We would be grateful for any donation which you would care to make. This could be either a one-off, or monthly payment. Upon discussion with our members, the sum of £200 was suggested.
We would be very grateful for your assistance right now, and would welcome a visit to our site from a representative of your club. I am only too happy to show interested people the garden. I could also send you photos of the garden and the sculptures created in it.
I look forward to hearing from you,
Yours Faithfully,
Ruth Solomon, Founder
Memory Gardens Sculpture Project
Email Warning from NCH about public events
Date: Friday, 1 August, 2008, 9:42 AM
Dear Ruth,
I think you may have received an e mail recently from Andrew McHardy indicating that NCH is considering extending your licence of occupation by a further six months to March 2009.
However, before NCH does this there are range of issues which we need to discuss. I have had recent conversations with Clare Tickell our Chief Executive and she is concerned about several issues on which we need to reach clear agreement before NCH is prepared to grant you an extension, and Clare has asked me to meet you as soon as possible.
Among other things I believe you may be planning to hold "open days" or some form of public meeting on the NCH site. Firstly, you did not raise this with NCH as your landlord & did not seek permission to do this. But also from a recent inspection I am very concerned about condition of the site and among other things concerned about liability for personal safety on NCH property. In the current circumstances I must ask you not to hold any such meetings on the NCH site. This is with the personal authority of Clare Tickell.
Nigel Harper
Director of Children's Services/Programme Manager, Accommodation Programme, NCH
Dear Ruth,
I think you may have received an e mail recently from Andrew McHardy indicating that NCH is considering extending your licence of occupation by a further six months to March 2009.
However, before NCH does this there are range of issues which we need to discuss. I have had recent conversations with Clare Tickell our Chief Executive and she is concerned about several issues on which we need to reach clear agreement before NCH is prepared to grant you an extension, and Clare has asked me to meet you as soon as possible.
Among other things I believe you may be planning to hold "open days" or some form of public meeting on the NCH site. Firstly, you did not raise this with NCH as your landlord & did not seek permission to do this. But also from a recent inspection I am very concerned about condition of the site and among other things concerned about liability for personal safety on NCH property. In the current circumstances I must ask you not to hold any such meetings on the NCH site. This is with the personal authority of Clare Tickell.
Nigel Harper
Director of Children's Services/Programme Manager, Accommodation Programme, NCH
Islington Tribune Article re. impending eviction
Islington Tribune - by ROISIN GADELRAB
Published: 1 August 2008
Autism group calls for ‘stay of execution’
Sculptors evicted from garden ‘haven’ as land is sold for housing development project
AN AUTISTIC sculpture group is pleading for a stay of execution before they are evicted from the garden they have made their haven.
The self-help group must leave Memory Garden in Legard Road, Highbury, in September, because landlord NCH (National Children’s Homes) is selling the land and neighbouring buildings to create 300 homes.
Although the group doesn’t oppose the redevelopment, members want to keep using the land until work starts, which could be years away.
Group co-ordinator Ruth Solomon said: “We don’t want to appear ungrateful to NCH and we’re no threat to their planning application.
“We only want to continue to use it until building work begins.
“It’s taken eight years to get where we are. We don’t want to be tidied away. We can’t just put everything in a bag and lay it on a table somewhere else.”
But NCH head of communications Greg Vines said the group “wanted to leave in September”, adding: “They’ve been part of our consultation and we need to keep to our timescale because we need to keep to costs.
“We’ve been trying to get hold of the co-ordinator for some time and have had no response.”
Although he wouldn’t say if NCH would consider letting the group stay longer, he said Ms Solomon should get in touch. But Ms Solomon said she had been frequently in contact with NCH and that the group only agreed to a in September after they were asked to leave much earlier, in December last year.
Ms Solomon found the land seven years ago and asked NCH if she could make use of it.
Since then, the group has cleared the garden, grown plants, berries and vegetables, and use it as a place to relax, create pieces of artwork and do daily duties like making the tea. The group now runs a youth club for autistic children.
One regular visitor has his own routine, where he retraces his steps around the garden every day as he puts out bird seed in very particular spots.
Others have carefully laid pieces of wood in a circular pattern in the middle of the ground, each one mapping out their memories. All this is soon to be lost.
Ms Solomon said the garden “challenges institutional care models” by allowing the visitors to work out their own ways of learning and acting.
She added: “Autistic people are at the centre of this project. They are the ones making the tea, arranging the plants, building the sculptures. In this situation they are the home-makers. So it is about ongoing small acts of hospitality.
“To be part of the community autistic people need active roles of participation. They need to experiment with their own value systems in a real place where their day-to-day decision making has a tangible, on-going effect.”
Adrian Whyatt, chairman of the Greater London Action on Disability, who uses the garden, said: “I come here to chill out. I didn’t want to have to conduct a campaign to save this because it destructs our peace.
“It’s been very stressful having to fight to keep it.”
David Shamash, who has been using the garden for five years, added: “Many people are attached to this place and will be sad to see it go.”
Published: 1 August 2008
Autism group calls for ‘stay of execution’
Sculptors evicted from garden ‘haven’ as land is sold for housing development project
AN AUTISTIC sculpture group is pleading for a stay of execution before they are evicted from the garden they have made their haven.
The self-help group must leave Memory Garden in Legard Road, Highbury, in September, because landlord NCH (National Children’s Homes) is selling the land and neighbouring buildings to create 300 homes.
Although the group doesn’t oppose the redevelopment, members want to keep using the land until work starts, which could be years away.
Group co-ordinator Ruth Solomon said: “We don’t want to appear ungrateful to NCH and we’re no threat to their planning application.
“We only want to continue to use it until building work begins.
“It’s taken eight years to get where we are. We don’t want to be tidied away. We can’t just put everything in a bag and lay it on a table somewhere else.”
But NCH head of communications Greg Vines said the group “wanted to leave in September”, adding: “They’ve been part of our consultation and we need to keep to our timescale because we need to keep to costs.
“We’ve been trying to get hold of the co-ordinator for some time and have had no response.”
Although he wouldn’t say if NCH would consider letting the group stay longer, he said Ms Solomon should get in touch. But Ms Solomon said she had been frequently in contact with NCH and that the group only agreed to a in September after they were asked to leave much earlier, in December last year.
Ms Solomon found the land seven years ago and asked NCH if she could make use of it.
Since then, the group has cleared the garden, grown plants, berries and vegetables, and use it as a place to relax, create pieces of artwork and do daily duties like making the tea. The group now runs a youth club for autistic children.
One regular visitor has his own routine, where he retraces his steps around the garden every day as he puts out bird seed in very particular spots.
Others have carefully laid pieces of wood in a circular pattern in the middle of the ground, each one mapping out their memories. All this is soon to be lost.
Ms Solomon said the garden “challenges institutional care models” by allowing the visitors to work out their own ways of learning and acting.
She added: “Autistic people are at the centre of this project. They are the ones making the tea, arranging the plants, building the sculptures. In this situation they are the home-makers. So it is about ongoing small acts of hospitality.
“To be part of the community autistic people need active roles of participation. They need to experiment with their own value systems in a real place where their day-to-day decision making has a tangible, on-going effect.”
Adrian Whyatt, chairman of the Greater London Action on Disability, who uses the garden, said: “I come here to chill out. I didn’t want to have to conduct a campaign to save this because it destructs our peace.
“It’s been very stressful having to fight to keep it.”
David Shamash, who has been using the garden for five years, added: “Many people are attached to this place and will be sad to see it go.”
Attendance Records
Youth and Mentoring Autistic Club
(Pilot Scheme)
Spring: 5.3.06-9.6.06
Sundays at two weekly intervals.
Ten Sessions.
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
1. Samuelle Hawkins x x x x x 0 x x x x
2. John Macleod x x x 0 0 x x 0 x x
3. Gabrielle Meth x x 0 x x 0 x x x 0
4. Edward Morriss x x x x x x 0 x x x
5. Francheska Winfun x x x x x x x x x x
6. Amnol Johar x x x x 0 x x x 0 x
7. Jake Hardy x x x x x x x x x x
8. Amy Strover 0 0 x x x x x x x x
9. Sidney Ley x x x x x x 0 x x 0
10. Daniel Shafiani x x x x 0 x x x 0 x
11. Leslie Salif Camara x x 0 x x x x 0 x x
12. Kayahan x x x x x x x x x x
13. Charles Yager x x x 0 0 0 x x x x
There were four workers at the beginning of the Club.
During the course of the Club, Lyndsey Noble has been promoted from the status of a Volunteer “Mentor”, to a worker.
Most of the children have high needs. That is the reason for the high proportion of play-workers to children.
* We hope to increase the number of children to 16 in Spring 2007. We will also be advertising for more Volunteers.
7.10.2006
(Pilot Scheme)
Spring: 5.3.06-9.6.06
Sundays at two weekly intervals.
Ten Sessions.
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
1. Samuelle Hawkins x x x x x 0 x x x x
2. John Macleod x x x 0 0 x x 0 x x
3. Gabrielle Meth x x 0 x x 0 x x x 0
4. Edward Morriss x x x x x x 0 x x x
5. Francheska Winfun x x x x x x x x x x
6. Amnol Johar x x x x 0 x x x 0 x
7. Jake Hardy x x x x x x x x x x
8. Amy Strover 0 0 x x x x x x x x
9. Sidney Ley x x x x x x 0 x x 0
10. Daniel Shafiani x x x x 0 x x x 0 x
11. Leslie Salif Camara x x 0 x x x x 0 x x
12. Kayahan x x x x x x x x x x
13. Charles Yager x x x 0 0 0 x x x x
There were four workers at the beginning of the Club.
During the course of the Club, Lyndsey Noble has been promoted from the status of a Volunteer “Mentor”, to a worker.
Most of the children have high needs. That is the reason for the high proportion of play-workers to children.
* We hope to increase the number of children to 16 in Spring 2007. We will also be advertising for more Volunteers.
7.10.2006
We Exist
We have been asked to leave the garden.
What is happening at the garden mirrors the general blindness that exists in relation to autistic people nationwide, as the NAS* has clearly marked out in their campaign, “I exist”
1. Who we are: We are a self-help group of autistic and dyslexic people who manage a garden environment; gardening, cooking and making sculptures and art-works together; sharing time by doing things.
2. How long have we existed for? We have existed for seven years, since 2001. This was the year when we found this piece of abandoned land to the side of NCH National Children’s Head Office in Highbury and begun to work on it.
3. What do we run there? We run an informal club for adults every Tuesday morning and a club for children with high needs every other Sunday morning.
4. Is the club open for non-autistic people? Yes. In the beginning we maintained a quiet space solely for autistic people. People on the spectrum could come to the garden on their own and make a sculpture/do gardening or could attend the club. This is how we first built up links between people. We made “transitional” sculptures which could be changed and added to by different people who may not meet in person but who would leave marks for one another through the sculptures. Later as we grew in confidence, we opened the club to local people and to members of the Peter Bedford ex-psychiatric unit next door. Informal support networks began to grow.
5. Why have you been asked to leave the garden? NCH have decided to move their main office from this site and are working with the council to gain planning permission for a housing development.
6. Have you been included in this consultation process? No. We found out by chance. In the brief we are not mentioned and on the map we are unmarked although we are within the grounds of the proposed site.
7. What is the date you are meant to leave? Our contract runs out on 30th September 2008
8. What will happen then? At present we have nowhere else to go. We do not know if the council is actually aware that We Exist.
What is happening at the garden mirrors the general blindness that exists in relation to autistic people nationwide, as the NAS* has clearly marked out in their campaign, “I exist”
1. Who we are: We are a self-help group of autistic and dyslexic people who manage a garden environment; gardening, cooking and making sculptures and art-works together; sharing time by doing things.
2. How long have we existed for? We have existed for seven years, since 2001. This was the year when we found this piece of abandoned land to the side of NCH National Children’s Head Office in Highbury and begun to work on it.
3. What do we run there? We run an informal club for adults every Tuesday morning and a club for children with high needs every other Sunday morning.
4. Is the club open for non-autistic people? Yes. In the beginning we maintained a quiet space solely for autistic people. People on the spectrum could come to the garden on their own and make a sculpture/do gardening or could attend the club. This is how we first built up links between people. We made “transitional” sculptures which could be changed and added to by different people who may not meet in person but who would leave marks for one another through the sculptures. Later as we grew in confidence, we opened the club to local people and to members of the Peter Bedford ex-psychiatric unit next door. Informal support networks began to grow.
5. Why have you been asked to leave the garden? NCH have decided to move their main office from this site and are working with the council to gain planning permission for a housing development.
6. Have you been included in this consultation process? No. We found out by chance. In the brief we are not mentioned and on the map we are unmarked although we are within the grounds of the proposed site.
7. What is the date you are meant to leave? Our contract runs out on 30th September 2008
8. What will happen then? At present we have nowhere else to go. We do not know if the council is actually aware that We Exist.
WE ARE WALKING THROUGH
We are walking through the line. Where rough-cut grass meets the manicured surface. We are crossing over it like a tumbling forward, because the surface is so smooth and regular on the cut grass and our feet are not used to it.
We are walking from “Memory Gardens” across the field and into the landscaped surface that leads to the big house, where NCH Head Offices are located.
From the garden that we have occupied for seven years, the sun bounces off the reflective surfaces of spottless windows from this main building and at certain moments of the day depending on where we are, we need to shield our eyes from the glare.
This is the first time in seven years that I have taken this five minute stroll with other members of this Autistic project. This is because I want to show Margaret, Molly and Eloina where to pick up the keys from the Head Office in order that they too can access our now permanently locked garden as a place to be, quietly on their own, as in fact was the original purpose of the garden, before the locks went on. It`s strange then that we can stroll through this backway from the garden to the office where no lock could be workeable, yet must pick up a key in order to be officially allowed in- like gaining access to a country with a passport.
At first we didn`t know why the locks had so suddenly come on and why we were being edged into a position of “strangeness” in relation to this space so that our eventual eviction seemed even to us eminant rather than negotiable despite the staged consultations in the early days in the big building, sitting at desks, behind those reflective windows that are just too far away to see out of and into the garden. The garden which has only now just been acknowledged by NCH as a real place because our removal is suddenly and uniquely for them, part of their work-day task. So it figures that we are a sum that needs to be properly calculated, a piece of work. Maybe a logistic nightmare. We and the garden have become one. Never have we aquired an identity so totally and so quickly. We have become “Memory Gardens”.
But this is not our nightmare. The garden we occupy is about the day-to-day things that are necessary to do on a regular and on-going basis.Which are necessary to do in any place. In shops down a highstreet, in homes or small-run businesses. In the hairdressers opposite where I get my hair cut. In building works- the knocking down of the nearby Arsenal stadium- turning it into flats and building the stadium elsewhere. In the NCH head office. That opens at 8.30 in the morning everyday and closes at 5.pm. Opening the gate, putting out the sign, making the tea, putting toilet paper in the loo.- soap and water to hand. Sweeping and washing down surfaces. Putting out chairs. Then the activites, the sessions: moving bricks and pieces of wood around into shapes, enclaves, pathways and bridges. It`s mundane stuff that needs doing and we do it. Others do it. Moving things on in stages.
We light fires. We may cook peanuts on the fire, prune plants or rake up leaves. Pick beans or light candles. This all depends on the weather. We are always somewhere between a cloudburst and a fine day. It also depends on who is there, on moods, on what comes to hand and in which particular direction we turn to on that day.
Today we are stepping over the line and Margaret who has taken many pictures up until now, of close-up moments of natural interest; patterns of leaves, branches, painted tiles, coloured cloth hanging from trees, now puts away the camera when we are on the other side of the line. We have been listening to birds; the call of nature or a “bloody racket”. But some kind of silence falls on us now.
We are lookng up at the large building and we are dishevelled. Intruders at odds with something that rebukes us. We are bounced back on ourselves and because of this there is all at once an atmosphe- like a slow renderning or an infinitely subtle dawn where the gradients are so finely sewn together that it is not possible to capture one moment as discreet along a natural transition to another. Time is going backwards or forwards or perhaps not moving at all. We are not shifting it on in stages like we usually do.. The ground is shifting of its own accord, making of this slow dawn appear a superimposition in the late afternon. Taking a photo would be making things less real, not more real, like screaming very loudly in order to get the attention of an ant. Is an ant really small or is it just far away and impossible to get close to however far and however fast you may walk. Perhaps we are on the edge of the horizon to one another, NCH and “Memory Gardens”.
Yet all at once there is a recognition amongst us, of the enormity of what this situation holds.There is a sense of an occasion.
This crossing of a line from where we have been day after day, year after year to the moment of aprehending the building, the lawn, the flower-beds, the peopleless space where conferences come and go as events in which intelligent, caring people come and take notes and leave again now with a further training and meals on top of that. My sister even went for a course here and did not even come over to the garden afterwards, not realising it was the same place at all. It is not the same place at all. It is just part of the same land.
We are walking from the one to the other. And the foxes we see, the cats, birds, maybe even the worms that pop up when we dig, have walked, flown crawled and munched their way through from one location to another. Across a border which they never once knew was there. Or whether it was there or not, this did not matter to them.They did not have the understanding of a border. Just as the kids who hop over the wall at the front exit and into the shed, breaking the flimsy padlock that NCH puts on our shed door as if snapping candy, do not recognise such borders. Are they home –makers or home-breakers?. They never once disturb the sculptures- just using the shed to smoke a joint, eat sweets, drink fizzy drinks, collapse into piles of laughter, scratch names and slang words on to the wooden panels of the shed before somehow getting back over the wall and staggering home.
So to return to where we were. The line between cut-grass and un-cut grass. Where “Memory Gardens” leads into the Head Offices of National Children`s Home, a national British charity with projects throughout the British Isles, England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland.
Put simply NCH would like us to leave because they fear bad publicity. They fear this bad publicity because they have discovered “Trace elements” of Legionaires disease in the water supply of the adjoining Familly Support Unit which mysteriously closed down, almost overnight, back in July and is the real reason why we are now in consultation with NCH over how and when we too will leave. Of course during the consulatation process we have put forward many ideas for how we might stay: using alternative access routes via another adjoining Mental Health project whom we have links with, working with NCH to create an Autistic Day centre in the empty Family Centre. All were turned down and we never knew why- we had not been told about the Legionaires but unstead were asked casually if we used the water much. “No” we said, proud of our compost loo put in because it`s better for Autistic kids to use a loo on site then off-site-. Our non-reliance on the creature comforts of electricity and water in this “Outdoor Living” club saved us for the time being but clearly embarassed NCH who just wanted rid of all possible liability- that if we got ill or died from dodgy water that they would pay.
Yes, they could have just evicted us but how do you tell an Autistic Project to go nicely when the proffessional diagnosis for this condition points to rigidity and possible trauma on the interuption of such routine? After all they are a National Charity dealing with vulnerable people. We were thus, by default in a “priveledged” position of seeing and knowing too much just by being there and doing the mundane everyday domestic things that we have always done. Eloina pointed out, “we have grown into a giant mushroom” with many spores throughout the nearby vicinity- in local mental Health Projects, Autistic organisations, parents who rely on the coffee breaks our clubs allow, adults who cross London with care-workers to drink tea, make fires and balance bricks, nearby allotments and people on the edge, with a need to light fires, community colleges and ecological organisations. NCH can not do what they would so like to do- just pluck us out. The mushroom is never just in one place at one time. Even when gone it is there. Even when there, it is just water held in a shape and then re-constituted elsewhere. Yet what is startling is how unedible we appear to be to them even though it is people just like us who they are dealing with day in and day out in their many projects across the land. Stand-in actors play the part of autistic adults or teenage mothers on the covers of their magazines- this is because they cannot use the true “face” of the people concerned- again for liability reasons. Faced then as they are now with our group, literally in their back garden, is a considerable mishap in the scheme of things- people high up are saying “It should never have been allowed to happen” “How have they managed to move on to the land and to be there for seven years?”. “It`s impossible”. It`s a media disaster in waiting. People are losing their jobs over it.
We arrived one day to do abit of Gardening after I`d accidentally wandered on to the disused plot and suggested to the owners-NCH- that we`d clear it up abit every Friday afternoon and maybe grow some tomotoes. Letters kept arriving through the post-box of the Head Office which I would send, always addressed to different chief executives as the turnover of staff erased one portion of time from the next. There were regular up-dates; “Now we have panted some herbs, now cleared the ground and laid down turf. We have put up a shed. Now we have a constitution. We`ve bought a lawn-mower and some tools and have insurance cover for their use. We are setting up a youth club to run seperately from the adult club” and so on.. It must have made boring reading to people who are juggling large sums of money, following government policies, implementing practical regime change in counties and in Health care and Service Providers which it is under their jurisdiction to overhaul, roll out and embed at a local and national level. There are meetings, figures of speach, presentations and awards. Some people fall by the wayside, others are promoted. So the wheel turns. Somehow we do not figure or only in a rushed off email when someone at a Conferance happens to wander down through the gardens inbetween speaches perhaps with a cup of coffee in hand. Crosses the line in reverse of the walk that we are now taking from the garden to the head office, and peers bleary-eyed through branches, at wire and bead mobiles hanging in the trees, bricks stacked so that they are not exactly a path, not exactly a standing object, paintings-almost primitive- on the white-washed wall- and a slow frown chances across their forehead. Something does not resolve- like a missed frame that makes a T.V programme suddenly invade the gastric juices of one`s stomach and one nearly loses balance, before, in a blink the picture re-congeals and one is sitting on the sofa where one always was, not lost within a moving frame, back at the conference. Nothing in any case registered for long enough for anything to be done about it. A queezy feeling that could have been put down to the wine over lunch was not enough reason to get us off the land.
Traces of Legionaires disease in the Water supply was on a different scale. It was more than a case of flatulance.
The Legionaires issue was only let slip when I met with a Land-surveyor from NCH and he was for one time not affectively “gagged” because another woman, higher up in the order of things, had at the last minute absented herself from the meeting. He was the first to say “If I were you I wouldn`t use the water, not even for watering plants because...”
The fear of bad publicity had prevented them giving this piece of quite important advice.
Crossing the line- seeing the reflecting surface up close that had bounced back our every move rather than risk us peering through the window. Things fell into place.
We knew why we had been there all along: waiting for that moment when the reflectivity no longer works for an instant. NCH, a National Charity, rather than protecting vulnerable people, would choose not to tell in order to secure a clean image. Even if it came to death from a disease which is only treatable when it is known. Better not to tell, so long as the documentation is in place and there is therefore no liability.
At that moment we walked right through the image and we saw into what is refleced out. Our responsiveness and our responsibility as adult human beings came together in the moment.
As we faced the building we felt pity for some of the employees inside.
Our specific situation looked out into other capacities and became a tool for awareness.
We are walking from “Memory Gardens” across the field and into the landscaped surface that leads to the big house, where NCH Head Offices are located.
From the garden that we have occupied for seven years, the sun bounces off the reflective surfaces of spottless windows from this main building and at certain moments of the day depending on where we are, we need to shield our eyes from the glare.
This is the first time in seven years that I have taken this five minute stroll with other members of this Autistic project. This is because I want to show Margaret, Molly and Eloina where to pick up the keys from the Head Office in order that they too can access our now permanently locked garden as a place to be, quietly on their own, as in fact was the original purpose of the garden, before the locks went on. It`s strange then that we can stroll through this backway from the garden to the office where no lock could be workeable, yet must pick up a key in order to be officially allowed in- like gaining access to a country with a passport.
At first we didn`t know why the locks had so suddenly come on and why we were being edged into a position of “strangeness” in relation to this space so that our eventual eviction seemed even to us eminant rather than negotiable despite the staged consultations in the early days in the big building, sitting at desks, behind those reflective windows that are just too far away to see out of and into the garden. The garden which has only now just been acknowledged by NCH as a real place because our removal is suddenly and uniquely for them, part of their work-day task. So it figures that we are a sum that needs to be properly calculated, a piece of work. Maybe a logistic nightmare. We and the garden have become one. Never have we aquired an identity so totally and so quickly. We have become “Memory Gardens”.
But this is not our nightmare. The garden we occupy is about the day-to-day things that are necessary to do on a regular and on-going basis.Which are necessary to do in any place. In shops down a highstreet, in homes or small-run businesses. In the hairdressers opposite where I get my hair cut. In building works- the knocking down of the nearby Arsenal stadium- turning it into flats and building the stadium elsewhere. In the NCH head office. That opens at 8.30 in the morning everyday and closes at 5.pm. Opening the gate, putting out the sign, making the tea, putting toilet paper in the loo.- soap and water to hand. Sweeping and washing down surfaces. Putting out chairs. Then the activites, the sessions: moving bricks and pieces of wood around into shapes, enclaves, pathways and bridges. It`s mundane stuff that needs doing and we do it. Others do it. Moving things on in stages.
We light fires. We may cook peanuts on the fire, prune plants or rake up leaves. Pick beans or light candles. This all depends on the weather. We are always somewhere between a cloudburst and a fine day. It also depends on who is there, on moods, on what comes to hand and in which particular direction we turn to on that day.
Today we are stepping over the line and Margaret who has taken many pictures up until now, of close-up moments of natural interest; patterns of leaves, branches, painted tiles, coloured cloth hanging from trees, now puts away the camera when we are on the other side of the line. We have been listening to birds; the call of nature or a “bloody racket”. But some kind of silence falls on us now.
We are lookng up at the large building and we are dishevelled. Intruders at odds with something that rebukes us. We are bounced back on ourselves and because of this there is all at once an atmosphe- like a slow renderning or an infinitely subtle dawn where the gradients are so finely sewn together that it is not possible to capture one moment as discreet along a natural transition to another. Time is going backwards or forwards or perhaps not moving at all. We are not shifting it on in stages like we usually do.. The ground is shifting of its own accord, making of this slow dawn appear a superimposition in the late afternon. Taking a photo would be making things less real, not more real, like screaming very loudly in order to get the attention of an ant. Is an ant really small or is it just far away and impossible to get close to however far and however fast you may walk. Perhaps we are on the edge of the horizon to one another, NCH and “Memory Gardens”.
Yet all at once there is a recognition amongst us, of the enormity of what this situation holds.There is a sense of an occasion.
This crossing of a line from where we have been day after day, year after year to the moment of aprehending the building, the lawn, the flower-beds, the peopleless space where conferences come and go as events in which intelligent, caring people come and take notes and leave again now with a further training and meals on top of that. My sister even went for a course here and did not even come over to the garden afterwards, not realising it was the same place at all. It is not the same place at all. It is just part of the same land.
We are walking from the one to the other. And the foxes we see, the cats, birds, maybe even the worms that pop up when we dig, have walked, flown crawled and munched their way through from one location to another. Across a border which they never once knew was there. Or whether it was there or not, this did not matter to them.They did not have the understanding of a border. Just as the kids who hop over the wall at the front exit and into the shed, breaking the flimsy padlock that NCH puts on our shed door as if snapping candy, do not recognise such borders. Are they home –makers or home-breakers?. They never once disturb the sculptures- just using the shed to smoke a joint, eat sweets, drink fizzy drinks, collapse into piles of laughter, scratch names and slang words on to the wooden panels of the shed before somehow getting back over the wall and staggering home.
So to return to where we were. The line between cut-grass and un-cut grass. Where “Memory Gardens” leads into the Head Offices of National Children`s Home, a national British charity with projects throughout the British Isles, England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland.
Put simply NCH would like us to leave because they fear bad publicity. They fear this bad publicity because they have discovered “Trace elements” of Legionaires disease in the water supply of the adjoining Familly Support Unit which mysteriously closed down, almost overnight, back in July and is the real reason why we are now in consultation with NCH over how and when we too will leave. Of course during the consulatation process we have put forward many ideas for how we might stay: using alternative access routes via another adjoining Mental Health project whom we have links with, working with NCH to create an Autistic Day centre in the empty Family Centre. All were turned down and we never knew why- we had not been told about the Legionaires but unstead were asked casually if we used the water much. “No” we said, proud of our compost loo put in because it`s better for Autistic kids to use a loo on site then off-site-. Our non-reliance on the creature comforts of electricity and water in this “Outdoor Living” club saved us for the time being but clearly embarassed NCH who just wanted rid of all possible liability- that if we got ill or died from dodgy water that they would pay.
Yes, they could have just evicted us but how do you tell an Autistic Project to go nicely when the proffessional diagnosis for this condition points to rigidity and possible trauma on the interuption of such routine? After all they are a National Charity dealing with vulnerable people. We were thus, by default in a “priveledged” position of seeing and knowing too much just by being there and doing the mundane everyday domestic things that we have always done. Eloina pointed out, “we have grown into a giant mushroom” with many spores throughout the nearby vicinity- in local mental Health Projects, Autistic organisations, parents who rely on the coffee breaks our clubs allow, adults who cross London with care-workers to drink tea, make fires and balance bricks, nearby allotments and people on the edge, with a need to light fires, community colleges and ecological organisations. NCH can not do what they would so like to do- just pluck us out. The mushroom is never just in one place at one time. Even when gone it is there. Even when there, it is just water held in a shape and then re-constituted elsewhere. Yet what is startling is how unedible we appear to be to them even though it is people just like us who they are dealing with day in and day out in their many projects across the land. Stand-in actors play the part of autistic adults or teenage mothers on the covers of their magazines- this is because they cannot use the true “face” of the people concerned- again for liability reasons. Faced then as they are now with our group, literally in their back garden, is a considerable mishap in the scheme of things- people high up are saying “It should never have been allowed to happen” “How have they managed to move on to the land and to be there for seven years?”. “It`s impossible”. It`s a media disaster in waiting. People are losing their jobs over it.
We arrived one day to do abit of Gardening after I`d accidentally wandered on to the disused plot and suggested to the owners-NCH- that we`d clear it up abit every Friday afternoon and maybe grow some tomotoes. Letters kept arriving through the post-box of the Head Office which I would send, always addressed to different chief executives as the turnover of staff erased one portion of time from the next. There were regular up-dates; “Now we have panted some herbs, now cleared the ground and laid down turf. We have put up a shed. Now we have a constitution. We`ve bought a lawn-mower and some tools and have insurance cover for their use. We are setting up a youth club to run seperately from the adult club” and so on.. It must have made boring reading to people who are juggling large sums of money, following government policies, implementing practical regime change in counties and in Health care and Service Providers which it is under their jurisdiction to overhaul, roll out and embed at a local and national level. There are meetings, figures of speach, presentations and awards. Some people fall by the wayside, others are promoted. So the wheel turns. Somehow we do not figure or only in a rushed off email when someone at a Conferance happens to wander down through the gardens inbetween speaches perhaps with a cup of coffee in hand. Crosses the line in reverse of the walk that we are now taking from the garden to the head office, and peers bleary-eyed through branches, at wire and bead mobiles hanging in the trees, bricks stacked so that they are not exactly a path, not exactly a standing object, paintings-almost primitive- on the white-washed wall- and a slow frown chances across their forehead. Something does not resolve- like a missed frame that makes a T.V programme suddenly invade the gastric juices of one`s stomach and one nearly loses balance, before, in a blink the picture re-congeals and one is sitting on the sofa where one always was, not lost within a moving frame, back at the conference. Nothing in any case registered for long enough for anything to be done about it. A queezy feeling that could have been put down to the wine over lunch was not enough reason to get us off the land.
Traces of Legionaires disease in the Water supply was on a different scale. It was more than a case of flatulance.
The Legionaires issue was only let slip when I met with a Land-surveyor from NCH and he was for one time not affectively “gagged” because another woman, higher up in the order of things, had at the last minute absented herself from the meeting. He was the first to say “If I were you I wouldn`t use the water, not even for watering plants because...”
The fear of bad publicity had prevented them giving this piece of quite important advice.
Crossing the line- seeing the reflecting surface up close that had bounced back our every move rather than risk us peering through the window. Things fell into place.
We knew why we had been there all along: waiting for that moment when the reflectivity no longer works for an instant. NCH, a National Charity, rather than protecting vulnerable people, would choose not to tell in order to secure a clean image. Even if it came to death from a disease which is only treatable when it is known. Better not to tell, so long as the documentation is in place and there is therefore no liability.
At that moment we walked right through the image and we saw into what is refleced out. Our responsiveness and our responsibility as adult human beings came together in the moment.
As we faced the building we felt pity for some of the employees inside.
Our specific situation looked out into other capacities and became a tool for awareness.
Funding Application Stage One.
To : The Tudor Trust
On behalf of: “Memory Gardens” Sculpture Club.
24.9.06
1. We are interested in networks.The same people who are isolated in a framework not of their own making, are viable with ideas and directions that matter, when the context for shared value is there. This context is everyone`s right.
We are experimenting with shape, rhythm and form in this outdoor space, making comparisons with what is muteable in nature and what is muteable in ourselves.
Making marks in the garden, seeing them change over time and indeed making changes and adaptations ourselves is at the heart of what we do.
The way we achieve networks is to let them happen. We are not rigid about who the project is intended for but we are clear about a certain emphasis to a way of working. We believe in movement, active engagement with things and elements;
Fire, water, earth, plants. We believe that the visual mapping of “Place”, through moving through it and making patterns of value as “Memory traces” that other people see and respond to creates links within people and between people and underpins a common value which is at a deeper level than language but can also support language. A value system that binds people together.
The difference we want to make is to enable people to experience and feel what is important to them and to others by being part of a network which is constantly renewed by their own involvement.
2. We are the right people to do this work because we are doing it. The project was begun out of a need five years ago. That need involved embedding creative and social activities into an outdoor continuous space where there could be a sense of belonging and a deep connection with tangible things. The first people to set the project up were artists and musicians isolated with autism, dyslexia and mental health problems.
In this sense the project has a pioneering “Survival” ethos to it which resonates to new members whose experience has rarely been of joint involvement but more of being a “Patient” or at best, “client”.
3. An interesting thing is happening in the garden and particularly as the diversity of needs and backgrounds has developed. People are learning to accomodate one another. The group sculptures and paintings that we do, create a Meter that atunes people to one another as they alternately witness and act, to balance an art-piece through combined input. This opens channels between people. These channels remain open and people become involved. Verbal people learn that nonverbal people think and express clear ideas and vision. Non-verbal people learn to communicate their needs through selected and trusted advocates who perhaps for the first time are needed.
The balance in the garden is constantly shifting and re-tuning, creating breakthroughs in unexpected ways. This can create moments which are volatile and dramatic but also caring and tender. The space does not go away and so all situations are important in the memory of the garden.
We know there is a need for such a project because it engages people.
It creates clear yet multi-layered roles for people who normally would be kept apart and not meet. We show that their meeting is beneficial. That people can help each other. That where people are invited to act they will. We believe that “Self-Help” groups have an important role to play both in creating networks and relationships and in long-term research into the nature of isolation and fragmentation and how practically and creatively this might be addressed.
We think that a familiar context with an on-going community of people based around “events” which are in essence positive can shift people from a position of dependency to that of Care of others. That this Care of others is a role which is necessary in order for people to feel they have a place in the world and indeed important if they are to have the strength to truly address their own core needs.
We know there is a need for such a project because people keep coming back.
It is a place that they invest hope in.This hope carries outwards to other activities. People begin to address other difficult areas of their lives in practical and intuitive ways. They are clearer about what they like and what is uncomfortable for them. And they feel that they have the right to express their needs and preferences and expect to be listened to.
4. We would use funding by you to assure our continuation.
To do that we need to:
a) Employ a part-time co-ordinator and an accountant.
b) Develop a dis-used store-room into an indoor space that over-looks the garden as a Meeting Place and Activites centre. ( When it rains, we are limited to a shed which is too small when there are lots of us).
c) Employ Mentors to enable high need members at certain stages of their involvement to attend the garden outside of the clubs when it is quiet and to have meaningful contact.
d) Develop a long-term committment to research and to publishing our findings on a web-site. This would include a clear to follow self-help guide of how to set up a project along our broad outlines but which would be unique to each location and the resources at hand.
Finally, we would use our link with you as a channel of on-going communication and support in areas such as organization and networking that our members sometimes find extremely difficult. We would use the link as a gage in validating and interpreting our ideas and vision and would hope to draw on your experience and the suggestions you make in order to create tangible and achievevable goals which can be communicated to others not familiar with our project but whose support is valuble to us.
Ruth Solomon
Founder/Chair
Memory Gardens Sculpture Club
22.9.06
On behalf of: “Memory Gardens” Sculpture Club.
24.9.06
1. We are interested in networks.The same people who are isolated in a framework not of their own making, are viable with ideas and directions that matter, when the context for shared value is there. This context is everyone`s right.
We are experimenting with shape, rhythm and form in this outdoor space, making comparisons with what is muteable in nature and what is muteable in ourselves.
Making marks in the garden, seeing them change over time and indeed making changes and adaptations ourselves is at the heart of what we do.
The way we achieve networks is to let them happen. We are not rigid about who the project is intended for but we are clear about a certain emphasis to a way of working. We believe in movement, active engagement with things and elements;
Fire, water, earth, plants. We believe that the visual mapping of “Place”, through moving through it and making patterns of value as “Memory traces” that other people see and respond to creates links within people and between people and underpins a common value which is at a deeper level than language but can also support language. A value system that binds people together.
The difference we want to make is to enable people to experience and feel what is important to them and to others by being part of a network which is constantly renewed by their own involvement.
2. We are the right people to do this work because we are doing it. The project was begun out of a need five years ago. That need involved embedding creative and social activities into an outdoor continuous space where there could be a sense of belonging and a deep connection with tangible things. The first people to set the project up were artists and musicians isolated with autism, dyslexia and mental health problems.
In this sense the project has a pioneering “Survival” ethos to it which resonates to new members whose experience has rarely been of joint involvement but more of being a “Patient” or at best, “client”.
3. An interesting thing is happening in the garden and particularly as the diversity of needs and backgrounds has developed. People are learning to accomodate one another. The group sculptures and paintings that we do, create a Meter that atunes people to one another as they alternately witness and act, to balance an art-piece through combined input. This opens channels between people. These channels remain open and people become involved. Verbal people learn that nonverbal people think and express clear ideas and vision. Non-verbal people learn to communicate their needs through selected and trusted advocates who perhaps for the first time are needed.
The balance in the garden is constantly shifting and re-tuning, creating breakthroughs in unexpected ways. This can create moments which are volatile and dramatic but also caring and tender. The space does not go away and so all situations are important in the memory of the garden.
We know there is a need for such a project because it engages people.
It creates clear yet multi-layered roles for people who normally would be kept apart and not meet. We show that their meeting is beneficial. That people can help each other. That where people are invited to act they will. We believe that “Self-Help” groups have an important role to play both in creating networks and relationships and in long-term research into the nature of isolation and fragmentation and how practically and creatively this might be addressed.
We think that a familiar context with an on-going community of people based around “events” which are in essence positive can shift people from a position of dependency to that of Care of others. That this Care of others is a role which is necessary in order for people to feel they have a place in the world and indeed important if they are to have the strength to truly address their own core needs.
We know there is a need for such a project because people keep coming back.
It is a place that they invest hope in.This hope carries outwards to other activities. People begin to address other difficult areas of their lives in practical and intuitive ways. They are clearer about what they like and what is uncomfortable for them. And they feel that they have the right to express their needs and preferences and expect to be listened to.
4. We would use funding by you to assure our continuation.
To do that we need to:
a) Employ a part-time co-ordinator and an accountant.
b) Develop a dis-used store-room into an indoor space that over-looks the garden as a Meeting Place and Activites centre. ( When it rains, we are limited to a shed which is too small when there are lots of us).
c) Employ Mentors to enable high need members at certain stages of their involvement to attend the garden outside of the clubs when it is quiet and to have meaningful contact.
d) Develop a long-term committment to research and to publishing our findings on a web-site. This would include a clear to follow self-help guide of how to set up a project along our broad outlines but which would be unique to each location and the resources at hand.
Finally, we would use our link with you as a channel of on-going communication and support in areas such as organization and networking that our members sometimes find extremely difficult. We would use the link as a gage in validating and interpreting our ideas and vision and would hope to draw on your experience and the suggestions you make in order to create tangible and achievevable goals which can be communicated to others not familiar with our project but whose support is valuble to us.
Ruth Solomon
Founder/Chair
Memory Gardens Sculpture Club
22.9.06
Thinking about the garden
THINKING ABOUT THE GARDEN
2007
Five years ago I found a piece of neglected land.
The Garden from the beginning was a place of engagement where physical input brought about results.
This sustained engagement was necessary in order to transform the space and gradually involved more and more people who added their own unique out-look to this whole.
To this day the space is “held” and brought about by all those involved with it. There is an attention to detail and sense of dometsic “care” in holding this space together. Noticing the “rightness” of this order and adjusting it as one would furniture in a living room is about recognising the part we all play in what it is. It comes to represent our relationship to one another.
In the garden the minor adjustments change from season to season and from each unique combination of human interaction at any one time. It may involve planting, weeding, making fires, feeding birds, initiating or responding to new sculptures or designs at various locations, watering plants or simply walking around the garden and taking in the details as part of a whole.
The garden is an extension of our own movement. When we walk through it or dwell in a chosen area, we unfold it.
Whilst Researching for this project I came across examples where places were used as maps that stored information that was released only through making connections by moving through that space . There were “Palaces of the Mind” in the Medieval era and Japanese contemplation gardens connected with Shinto nature religions. Now these spaces have become embedded within computer systems as “virtual” landscapes. All these systems are useful for Autistic people in particular because information depends on physical engagement and there is a slow release which means images do not overwhelm. They are unstead made tangible through direct experience and contact.
The garden then can create a kind of feedback loop where memory can be stored and brought back up by initiating the movement that originally gave rise to it. When the garden is shared by many, these memories build and interlink with others.
This was the original intention behind the garden.
2007
Five years ago I found a piece of neglected land.
The Garden from the beginning was a place of engagement where physical input brought about results.
This sustained engagement was necessary in order to transform the space and gradually involved more and more people who added their own unique out-look to this whole.
To this day the space is “held” and brought about by all those involved with it. There is an attention to detail and sense of dometsic “care” in holding this space together. Noticing the “rightness” of this order and adjusting it as one would furniture in a living room is about recognising the part we all play in what it is. It comes to represent our relationship to one another.
In the garden the minor adjustments change from season to season and from each unique combination of human interaction at any one time. It may involve planting, weeding, making fires, feeding birds, initiating or responding to new sculptures or designs at various locations, watering plants or simply walking around the garden and taking in the details as part of a whole.
The garden is an extension of our own movement. When we walk through it or dwell in a chosen area, we unfold it.
Whilst Researching for this project I came across examples where places were used as maps that stored information that was released only through making connections by moving through that space . There were “Palaces of the Mind” in the Medieval era and Japanese contemplation gardens connected with Shinto nature religions. Now these spaces have become embedded within computer systems as “virtual” landscapes. All these systems are useful for Autistic people in particular because information depends on physical engagement and there is a slow release which means images do not overwhelm. They are unstead made tangible through direct experience and contact.
The garden then can create a kind of feedback loop where memory can be stored and brought back up by initiating the movement that originally gave rise to it. When the garden is shared by many, these memories build and interlink with others.
This was the original intention behind the garden.
FIRE
FIRE
We’re standing round the fire. It has been raining so we sent the kids home. The parents all turned up together after I’d rung one of them on their mobile saying it was raining heavily and all the kids were wet. One man who was visiting the garden had an umbrella but didn’t much like the one kid standing in front of him and falling back on him so as not to get rained on from the drips of the umbrella. He tried walking him over to the Gazebo saying, “I’m going over here. Are you coming too?” Then he walked together with the boy who now stuck to his side, linking arms, and then tried to unravel himself from the boy and deposit him under the gazebo which he then walked quickly away from. The boy just followed him out again. The parents had been in a café together. They collected their kids and the dripping garments here and there lying around the garden and one by one went.
It was a miracle that the fire was still burning in all that wetness, but we’d lit it before the rain had really come down and now it was established, though smoking a good deal from the wood closest to the surface which was wet and getting wetter.
The area around the fire is mud with ingrained footprints of various sizes. The man with the umbrella has also gone by now, some time after he’d been bitten by another boy because he didn’t know about keeping a particular distance from this boy and had overstepped a mark without even realising he was doing it. Though he’d been bitten through a heavy tweed trench coat, somewhere on his shoulder, I think later more than when it actually happened it was beginning to affect him. I think he felt marked.
A man who recently started as a volunteer- who was quiet with his hood up, buried into his own body that day in august- the day of the street festival that we all attended, but since then, since coming to the garden, has talked and moved a great deal and now begins again, whilst walking up and down, collecting more wood, to speak. There is time to listen. It is early and wet and we are all gathered around the fire. I don’t remember the exact words that this man used so tied in with the gestures were they as if he were sewing them together with his own body motions. But I will try to describe the images and scenes that he conjured up in his brief account, spurred on by the fire, the warmth within, that we leaned into, towered over, the mud and spitting rain all around that we drew our backs up against.
He was one figure caught into the movement of a swelling crowd outside the gates of Buckingham palace. He’d been going down there every day and when not directly outside the gates was walking with the throngs around St James park, drifting along the side-lines of the river, with the birds, pigeons and over weight squirrels that every one was feeding. People were crying, holding hands tightly until the blood was squeezed from the fingers and palms, gathering, kneeling in groups, whispering to one another. Fresh flowers at the gates of the palace were piling on top of older ones, cards with countless different personal messages, scrawled signatures, bodies giving way to gravity, collapsible but with a lightness. Tom was entrapped in the folds of such enchantment. There was the magic of a feeling written on the surface of things that he had never experienced before in his writerly academically grounded parental home even though his journalist father had been exiled by the Croatian government for his left wing writing. Yet such matters had never been discussed in terms of how it impacted on the body, on the nervous system, on ones ability to stand or fall, cry and remember. All in all for Tom it had been a bit of a blank because without that impact on the body, on the organs, on the digestion, in that push and pull of an intertwined mobility- of a heaving crowd that locked one in to something, released one out, only to come back the next morning for more- a crowd that possessed you and that you possessed, no memory could catch on- nothing anymore could burn which in his household had become a kind of melancholic letting go- a normalised stretching of the rationalised arguments like dry parchment over a body that had led to this or that being known even whilst going about ones daily life as if nothing much had happened.
Tom grasped the mood that summer of 1996 around the time of his 21st birthday. The summer of the catastrophic car-crash in the tunnel of a Paris ring-road in which the princess, the princess Diana died. It affected Tom like nothing before. He caught on to the mood and felt like he had never felt before.
One day, in the mass of this shared heaving spasm Tom was spotted by his uncle and his uncle took a look at Tom’s pale yet flushed face, his stinking clothes, the euphoric sparkle of eyes drifting well above the body and said, “you don’t look quite right” What is the matter with you?” Soon that phrase took hold and everyone was asking, “What is the matter with Tom?” It got so that even Tom was asking that and in that question, the crowds’ momentum at Buckingham palace halted. Its ability to take him with it halted, and the expression of that very question was re packaged into a curt diagnosis that related to Tom alone, not the crowd, the vehicle of his then expression.
Without that mobile reactive crowd of which Tom was a part he felt washed up, half-dead, unable to express himself. He still remembers the doctor who diagnosed him, a balding man who would not look directly at him but only at his mother, his father or other family members who attended the sessions. If Tom made a gesture it seemed like that gesture was sectioned off, marked around, and examined like something to hold in ones hand. If Tom moved forward in a gesture, using that gesture as a point of convergence as with the palms of the hands pressed tightly between strangers in St James Park, his psychiatrist moved away, his image becoming progressively more and more blurred around the edges. Tom was pronounced psychotic. Then in the conversations that followed- meandering chats and discussions between the doctor and his mother about his childhood or with other family members- out of these “little conversations” he was given the label of autism.
For around six months he was taken to a place where he lived and stayed- ate and slept. It was a frightening place in which were housed other people with strange and explosive behaviours. Tom became caught up in avoiding upsetting what could not be monitored. He began not talking. Some of these people looked strange to him. There was something not symmetrical about their features or their eyes. He looked in the mirror and noticed that his own head was large, that his jaw was very pronounced or so it appeared to him right then, more pronounced than the jaws of his family members. He began to see himself as different; as the result of some terrible mistake for the first time in his life.
We begin talking about the session at the garden. How it had nearly been a catastrophe but somehow hadn’t been. No one had fallen, slipped or been injured. However it did touch on a kind of madness or intensity with the fire in the middle of the ground, left over from the Guy Fawkes night and lit again on request in which everyone was drawn into this central magnet, adults and children, workers and visitors in which some kind of quiet tangible distance between children in entirely different areas and through different practises which at most other sessions mark out their ability to casually touch one another was somehow collapsed into the noise and furore of that centre-stage sucking us into a limited but tangible warmth and organising actions accordingly. It was more then just a spectacle; it was a new pacing device which somehow brought to the scene a heightened rhythm that spun into relief the opposites of hot and cold, rain and fire, in which and through which all dramas, all cataclysmic episodes could possibly emerge and out of which finally came that story about the crash and in its telling our listening stillness.
In the events in the garden of that day we hardly noticed Edward, a boy of 13 who was systematically throwing glass and ceramic bowls, jars and flower-pots against a nearby whitewashed brick wall in the far corner, far from the warmth of the fire, in the driving rain. Consequently that event became as natural as the rain itself; a backdrop to all that was occurring. It was neutralized. We knew it only from the smashed remains of jars and containers found later and pieced back together into the small recollections, sightings and alignments that various people made in relation to Edward’s whereabouts during the course of that session. Never in fact were they known or seen in the event itself.
Nov 23 2009
Ruth Solomon
We’re standing round the fire. It has been raining so we sent the kids home. The parents all turned up together after I’d rung one of them on their mobile saying it was raining heavily and all the kids were wet. One man who was visiting the garden had an umbrella but didn’t much like the one kid standing in front of him and falling back on him so as not to get rained on from the drips of the umbrella. He tried walking him over to the Gazebo saying, “I’m going over here. Are you coming too?” Then he walked together with the boy who now stuck to his side, linking arms, and then tried to unravel himself from the boy and deposit him under the gazebo which he then walked quickly away from. The boy just followed him out again. The parents had been in a café together. They collected their kids and the dripping garments here and there lying around the garden and one by one went.
It was a miracle that the fire was still burning in all that wetness, but we’d lit it before the rain had really come down and now it was established, though smoking a good deal from the wood closest to the surface which was wet and getting wetter.
The area around the fire is mud with ingrained footprints of various sizes. The man with the umbrella has also gone by now, some time after he’d been bitten by another boy because he didn’t know about keeping a particular distance from this boy and had overstepped a mark without even realising he was doing it. Though he’d been bitten through a heavy tweed trench coat, somewhere on his shoulder, I think later more than when it actually happened it was beginning to affect him. I think he felt marked.
A man who recently started as a volunteer- who was quiet with his hood up, buried into his own body that day in august- the day of the street festival that we all attended, but since then, since coming to the garden, has talked and moved a great deal and now begins again, whilst walking up and down, collecting more wood, to speak. There is time to listen. It is early and wet and we are all gathered around the fire. I don’t remember the exact words that this man used so tied in with the gestures were they as if he were sewing them together with his own body motions. But I will try to describe the images and scenes that he conjured up in his brief account, spurred on by the fire, the warmth within, that we leaned into, towered over, the mud and spitting rain all around that we drew our backs up against.
He was one figure caught into the movement of a swelling crowd outside the gates of Buckingham palace. He’d been going down there every day and when not directly outside the gates was walking with the throngs around St James park, drifting along the side-lines of the river, with the birds, pigeons and over weight squirrels that every one was feeding. People were crying, holding hands tightly until the blood was squeezed from the fingers and palms, gathering, kneeling in groups, whispering to one another. Fresh flowers at the gates of the palace were piling on top of older ones, cards with countless different personal messages, scrawled signatures, bodies giving way to gravity, collapsible but with a lightness. Tom was entrapped in the folds of such enchantment. There was the magic of a feeling written on the surface of things that he had never experienced before in his writerly academically grounded parental home even though his journalist father had been exiled by the Croatian government for his left wing writing. Yet such matters had never been discussed in terms of how it impacted on the body, on the nervous system, on ones ability to stand or fall, cry and remember. All in all for Tom it had been a bit of a blank because without that impact on the body, on the organs, on the digestion, in that push and pull of an intertwined mobility- of a heaving crowd that locked one in to something, released one out, only to come back the next morning for more- a crowd that possessed you and that you possessed, no memory could catch on- nothing anymore could burn which in his household had become a kind of melancholic letting go- a normalised stretching of the rationalised arguments like dry parchment over a body that had led to this or that being known even whilst going about ones daily life as if nothing much had happened.
Tom grasped the mood that summer of 1996 around the time of his 21st birthday. The summer of the catastrophic car-crash in the tunnel of a Paris ring-road in which the princess, the princess Diana died. It affected Tom like nothing before. He caught on to the mood and felt like he had never felt before.
One day, in the mass of this shared heaving spasm Tom was spotted by his uncle and his uncle took a look at Tom’s pale yet flushed face, his stinking clothes, the euphoric sparkle of eyes drifting well above the body and said, “you don’t look quite right” What is the matter with you?” Soon that phrase took hold and everyone was asking, “What is the matter with Tom?” It got so that even Tom was asking that and in that question, the crowds’ momentum at Buckingham palace halted. Its ability to take him with it halted, and the expression of that very question was re packaged into a curt diagnosis that related to Tom alone, not the crowd, the vehicle of his then expression.
Without that mobile reactive crowd of which Tom was a part he felt washed up, half-dead, unable to express himself. He still remembers the doctor who diagnosed him, a balding man who would not look directly at him but only at his mother, his father or other family members who attended the sessions. If Tom made a gesture it seemed like that gesture was sectioned off, marked around, and examined like something to hold in ones hand. If Tom moved forward in a gesture, using that gesture as a point of convergence as with the palms of the hands pressed tightly between strangers in St James Park, his psychiatrist moved away, his image becoming progressively more and more blurred around the edges. Tom was pronounced psychotic. Then in the conversations that followed- meandering chats and discussions between the doctor and his mother about his childhood or with other family members- out of these “little conversations” he was given the label of autism.
For around six months he was taken to a place where he lived and stayed- ate and slept. It was a frightening place in which were housed other people with strange and explosive behaviours. Tom became caught up in avoiding upsetting what could not be monitored. He began not talking. Some of these people looked strange to him. There was something not symmetrical about their features or their eyes. He looked in the mirror and noticed that his own head was large, that his jaw was very pronounced or so it appeared to him right then, more pronounced than the jaws of his family members. He began to see himself as different; as the result of some terrible mistake for the first time in his life.
We begin talking about the session at the garden. How it had nearly been a catastrophe but somehow hadn’t been. No one had fallen, slipped or been injured. However it did touch on a kind of madness or intensity with the fire in the middle of the ground, left over from the Guy Fawkes night and lit again on request in which everyone was drawn into this central magnet, adults and children, workers and visitors in which some kind of quiet tangible distance between children in entirely different areas and through different practises which at most other sessions mark out their ability to casually touch one another was somehow collapsed into the noise and furore of that centre-stage sucking us into a limited but tangible warmth and organising actions accordingly. It was more then just a spectacle; it was a new pacing device which somehow brought to the scene a heightened rhythm that spun into relief the opposites of hot and cold, rain and fire, in which and through which all dramas, all cataclysmic episodes could possibly emerge and out of which finally came that story about the crash and in its telling our listening stillness.
In the events in the garden of that day we hardly noticed Edward, a boy of 13 who was systematically throwing glass and ceramic bowls, jars and flower-pots against a nearby whitewashed brick wall in the far corner, far from the warmth of the fire, in the driving rain. Consequently that event became as natural as the rain itself; a backdrop to all that was occurring. It was neutralized. We knew it only from the smashed remains of jars and containers found later and pieced back together into the small recollections, sightings and alignments that various people made in relation to Edward’s whereabouts during the course of that session. Never in fact were they known or seen in the event itself.
Nov 23 2009
Ruth Solomon
THE WAY WE WERE
July 2007
It is hard to shout about what is normal and mundane. It is just there; The everyday. Making us feel there is always something to do yet nevertheless feeling the urge to slack off; watch the birds, drink tea or do nothing much at all.
Have I described what this project is about? Well no. It would be the recounting of one thing after another. Just that. Going on and on and on. Which would be boring. Better to be there in person. Only we are being closed down at the end of the year.
What does that actually mean? That we will lose a piece of land? That there will be a lock on the gate? That we will have no right to enter either alone or together?
We`ve been coming here for seven years. Doing things or relaxing. First it was a mess-tarmac and brambles. We cleared it-set up pathways. Set up places to stop-seats or areas where plants came together or parted to give a nice view. We even put in our own toilet; another place to stop.
We`ve had nice times here; sharing cake, cracking walnuts-potatoes on the fire, kebabs and salad. Then there`s been times when it`s rained and we`ve got drenched, or we`ve been bashed around and shredded by our own efforts to get the space in shape. We`ve shaped ourselves in this way; bruises, cuts. And a sense of the ground below and the air above.
That`s how somehow we have ended up in a living situation. Even though we`re “Autistic” or “Mental Health Survivors” or somehow out of touch with the flow of society. So how did that happen? It never meant to go that far but somehow it did.
We don`t ask why. We put plants in the earth- pick up stones and re-position them, pile up bricks into impossible shapes that are there and then are rearanged. We are detectives following the movement of birds, foxes, and one another. We read into the marks of what is there to know about what happened before. It seems obvious: That you need a fixed space with unchanging borders to know about change just as you need a rectangle of paper in order that ideas can merge and reformulate to express thoughts.
Without telling you our conversations, showing you the garden, the way we look, the sculptures we make perhaps you can get a sense of who we are.
We are you. We need consistancy at one level in order to follow movement at another. We do that when we cook, take the garbage out, chat, socialise or think.
The person on the street. Who are they? Where are they going? Are they coming to the garden, going home, meeting others, going to work?. How can you tell- is it the way they look, the way they talk, the way they move?
People with a Special Need once they are diagnosed somehow become the property of the institutions that define them. It is a two- way enclosure whereby they are wrapped around policy decisions and the decisions get stuck to and influence their every movement. A downward spiral of “safety” sometimes takes hold whereby what is “Safe” is the inside of a room with a screen projecting adverts of the “right life”.
Autistic rage may flare up when their own movements are locked and they are, day in and day out, forced to witness untouchable icons of “right living”. Or else these icons are re-claimed as rituals and lived out as obsessional merry-go-rounds; words may be used in this way or actions such as hand-washing or tea drinking.
We all have a right to a private life where we can construct our own meanings.
Yes, bricks are for building houses with; homes where we live. But they can also become mutable and elastic, built up and knocked down according to what we feel is right. No we would not do that with our homes and to do so would be innapropriate, but Art is about taking things locked in situations which when frozen may become deadly, and letting them rearange and so re emerge.
Mostly we do not have to constantly remind ourselves what is real-life and what is not. We hold these things together between us so that what we know becomes common knowledge. But when that is not the case we are in a potentially dangerous situation. If our real house becomes a fable to others, we face anihilation on every turn. If what is actually a fable to us is taken with deadly seriousness by everyone around us, we are most likely always going to be in trouble.
Sharing experience and believing that there is a world that exists in common is about atunement. That means doing everyday boring domestic things over and over again and calling the results of those many simultaneous or parallel actions a shared space. It also means having systems in place to record this presence in tangible symbols which is why we make sculptures and do large colour drip paintings together. It means seeing people when they are up and when they are down and embedding them in the garden with all their tangents as necessary elements to the whole. It means a sense of acceptance even when things get tedious, annoying, difficult or seemingly impossible.
We are not ideal people and the garden is not an ideal space. We are not doing things in the best way all the time and we are not the best problem solvers all the time. But we have our way which is ours; not the imprint or off-shoot of someone elses idea of where functionality begins and where it ends in us. We know that those people, just like us are part of the story and part of the reality. We all help to define one another. The garden is simply about acknowledging that this goes on and will carry on going on. Only by being present in a space where everyone has responsibility do we manage things according to what is real to our everyday situation. That`s important for a sense of who we are.
______
Memory Gardens will be closed down at the end of the year by NCH who want the land back.
Ruth Solomon
Co-ordinatotor Memory Gardens
July 2007
We are situated in Legard Road, N4 next to Peter Bedford housing association at the back of NCH head office, Lucerne Rd.
It is hard to shout about what is normal and mundane. It is just there; The everyday. Making us feel there is always something to do yet nevertheless feeling the urge to slack off; watch the birds, drink tea or do nothing much at all.
Have I described what this project is about? Well no. It would be the recounting of one thing after another. Just that. Going on and on and on. Which would be boring. Better to be there in person. Only we are being closed down at the end of the year.
What does that actually mean? That we will lose a piece of land? That there will be a lock on the gate? That we will have no right to enter either alone or together?
We`ve been coming here for seven years. Doing things or relaxing. First it was a mess-tarmac and brambles. We cleared it-set up pathways. Set up places to stop-seats or areas where plants came together or parted to give a nice view. We even put in our own toilet; another place to stop.
We`ve had nice times here; sharing cake, cracking walnuts-potatoes on the fire, kebabs and salad. Then there`s been times when it`s rained and we`ve got drenched, or we`ve been bashed around and shredded by our own efforts to get the space in shape. We`ve shaped ourselves in this way; bruises, cuts. And a sense of the ground below and the air above.
That`s how somehow we have ended up in a living situation. Even though we`re “Autistic” or “Mental Health Survivors” or somehow out of touch with the flow of society. So how did that happen? It never meant to go that far but somehow it did.
We don`t ask why. We put plants in the earth- pick up stones and re-position them, pile up bricks into impossible shapes that are there and then are rearanged. We are detectives following the movement of birds, foxes, and one another. We read into the marks of what is there to know about what happened before. It seems obvious: That you need a fixed space with unchanging borders to know about change just as you need a rectangle of paper in order that ideas can merge and reformulate to express thoughts.
Without telling you our conversations, showing you the garden, the way we look, the sculptures we make perhaps you can get a sense of who we are.
We are you. We need consistancy at one level in order to follow movement at another. We do that when we cook, take the garbage out, chat, socialise or think.
The person on the street. Who are they? Where are they going? Are they coming to the garden, going home, meeting others, going to work?. How can you tell- is it the way they look, the way they talk, the way they move?
People with a Special Need once they are diagnosed somehow become the property of the institutions that define them. It is a two- way enclosure whereby they are wrapped around policy decisions and the decisions get stuck to and influence their every movement. A downward spiral of “safety” sometimes takes hold whereby what is “Safe” is the inside of a room with a screen projecting adverts of the “right life”.
Autistic rage may flare up when their own movements are locked and they are, day in and day out, forced to witness untouchable icons of “right living”. Or else these icons are re-claimed as rituals and lived out as obsessional merry-go-rounds; words may be used in this way or actions such as hand-washing or tea drinking.
We all have a right to a private life where we can construct our own meanings.
Yes, bricks are for building houses with; homes where we live. But they can also become mutable and elastic, built up and knocked down according to what we feel is right. No we would not do that with our homes and to do so would be innapropriate, but Art is about taking things locked in situations which when frozen may become deadly, and letting them rearange and so re emerge.
Mostly we do not have to constantly remind ourselves what is real-life and what is not. We hold these things together between us so that what we know becomes common knowledge. But when that is not the case we are in a potentially dangerous situation. If our real house becomes a fable to others, we face anihilation on every turn. If what is actually a fable to us is taken with deadly seriousness by everyone around us, we are most likely always going to be in trouble.
Sharing experience and believing that there is a world that exists in common is about atunement. That means doing everyday boring domestic things over and over again and calling the results of those many simultaneous or parallel actions a shared space. It also means having systems in place to record this presence in tangible symbols which is why we make sculptures and do large colour drip paintings together. It means seeing people when they are up and when they are down and embedding them in the garden with all their tangents as necessary elements to the whole. It means a sense of acceptance even when things get tedious, annoying, difficult or seemingly impossible.
We are not ideal people and the garden is not an ideal space. We are not doing things in the best way all the time and we are not the best problem solvers all the time. But we have our way which is ours; not the imprint or off-shoot of someone elses idea of where functionality begins and where it ends in us. We know that those people, just like us are part of the story and part of the reality. We all help to define one another. The garden is simply about acknowledging that this goes on and will carry on going on. Only by being present in a space where everyone has responsibility do we manage things according to what is real to our everyday situation. That`s important for a sense of who we are.
______
Memory Gardens will be closed down at the end of the year by NCH who want the land back.
Ruth Solomon
Co-ordinatotor Memory Gardens
July 2007
We are situated in Legard Road, N4 next to Peter Bedford housing association at the back of NCH head office, Lucerne Rd.
THE GARDEN THAT NOBODY TOLD YOU ABOUT
It is spring, March 26th, 2009. At Memory Gardens Autistic Project we have just dug up plants, emptied out tools and art materials from the store-room and distributed them as best we can to other community projects in the neighbourhood. There has been a slow trail of people coming and going all day long with beat up cars, wheelbarrows or simply their own bodies to carry things away with.
Where are we situated on this practical work-day in March? We are situated just off Legard Road, in Highbiry and Islington, North London. To find us you must get past the metal gates leading into the now disused NCH family Unit. You must then pick your way through an array of loose bricks and building materials where the wall between NCH, now “Action for Children” and legard Works has been dismantled. There is moss that furs up the tarmac. Action for Children are negotiating the sale of a larger area that includes and does not discriminate our small garden project with the buildings, car-parks, fields, formal gardens and disused tennis courts that make up the proposed area of new development. So much does the planning brief not discriminate one use from another and tend to run the whole area together as one as if it were already a building site that we are not even mentioned though strangely, the disused tennis courts are.
It has been ten years since I first arrived at what is now an autistic and community sculpture project. Then, not only moss but brambles grew abundantly between the tarmac that the force of its growth tore up in what is now the front lawn of the garden. Bricks were unearthed until they formed a kind of Berlin wall possibly from a building bombed in the war which collapsed onto itself as each floor gave way to the next like a deck of cards. Not having the means to move the bricks we used them; in pathways, flower beds and the many sculptures that came and went creating a soundless web between people who by choice or necessity, preferred to do and not say.
I said before that you would have trouble finding the project. Yet on the days when we ran the adult sculpture club or the youth and mentoring club you would, if you’d passed down Legard Rd, seen our sign “Memory Gardens” with a green peacock inscribed underneath by an autistic adult. And if you’d found out about our club through City and Islington college, through autistic publications or in the notices we put up in nearby community venues, you’d have had a map, had a phone no., had an email contact and might have made your way to the quiet and out of the way garden.
Perhaps you did. In the garden you1d have sat down, been offered tea by a one of the members and begun to walk around in your own time or to involve yourself in the poject underway. That might be tending vegetables, making a joint sculpture, making a joint painting on calico cloth, painting tiles to stick on the walls, creating a mobile out of wore and beads to hang in the trees. Occasionally we would hld barbecues- cook kebabs or stir fry wit some of our grown vegetables.
We were never large producers. We didn’t grow to sell. We didn’t claim to teach gardening or to follow individual learning plans of self-development or self-improvement. What we did do was to hold together a shared space; look after it and in a sense create an unlikely sense of community in the process- between autistic members, carers, parents, people from Legard works next door where their beautiful café became an important focus and extension for some of our members whilst they also extended into some of our projects and activities. Familiarity grew up slowly that also came to include local people who had heard about us and felt like joining in.
I have not wanted to linger in this open letter as to the reasons why we were never recognised by NCH as a resource worth addressing. Why they seemed uncomfortable about our way of doing things as a gradual knowledge base that unfolds from one point of contact to the next through practical participation; where involvement builds; Where community spaces must involve active and multiple uses that change over time s people do. There are so many run down playgrounds, parks and community spaces because facilities are designed for pre-figured groups with pre-figured needs and interests that actually make a truly shared space impossible. So people give up on it. A space must be actively maintained and turned over by the people who use it. Funding and organisation can not be a one off at the initial stage of development. It must be on-gong because a sustainable development is a work in progress.
I feel that NCH although initially agreeing to our use of their land- to which we will always be appreciative, did not protect us, support our work or incorporate us in ways that could have been innovative and useful both un terms of their charitable work and in terms of the planned new development on the Highbury site. Rather they let the serves run down to such an extent that we were affevtively starved out- the electricity was cut, the water was cut, the storeroom roof begun to give way, there was no security on the site.
We became a liability mixed up in their attitude to the site that everything was running down. But it didn’t need to go that way and their could have been a joint understanding to make use of the land up until active development begun and to continue the community use as a way of researching how best to approach the community aspects of the new development. That could have been a way of learning from and where possible incorporating what was already there. Instead we became the embarrassing relatives who are good on details of preparation but are not invited to the party for fear of what they may do or say.
For ten years we were all but invisible. But when we did go to the press in Aug 2008 to say that, Yes we do exist and have rights and needs, we avoided the immediate eviction of Sep 2008 but ensured in the plans of Action For Children that we would go on the next available date and opportunity in the new year. That is set at march 31st.
The National Autistic Society has recently drawn attention in their “I EXIST” campaign, to the gap in services for adults with autism who are affectively dropped once they no longer fall under child services. Additionally they are often left with no support because they do not fit into mental health or learning disability categories. Many urban environments with an excess of sound, pollution and food additives become intolerable for them causing them gradually to move away from community events and to retreat into isolation. It is ironic that is only at such points of personal crisis that they are then again eligible for help. It is not that autistic people do not want or need community or that that this is a choice and merely a condition of their diagnosis. Rather the model of community needs to adapt to real needs to consider what is actually workable for the participants.
I hope therefore on parting, that Memory Gardens can have its own faint legacy- a quiet insistence, in the new development, of the need to create truly inclusive community space. Action for children could have consulted us over this issue and drawn on our knowledge developed gradually over the last ten years. They chose not to but instead to hurry us out months and probably years before- in this financial climate- the building work commences. It will be interesting to see what happens to this patch of land, now gated and disused, over the forthcoming months and years. We will be following that story carefully, as I hope you will, from outside the gates.
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.
____
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
Environment of living patterns
An eight year self-organized sculpture Garden project initiated by autistic/dyslexic artists, gardeners and therapists.
____
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
A review before leaving
MEMORY GARDENS AUTISTIC GARDEN
AIMS
1. To provide an on-going habitat that integrates many movements.
2. To allow a place of return so that the changing tempo of some of these cycles of movement can be known and influenced by the actions and sensibility of all visitors and participants.
3. To put central to an environment the agents- human, animal and vegetable- that makes that environment.
4. To allow some of the human agents-autistic members and those with a history of mental health issues- to be central to this process of gradual change and modification so that they instigate the process through:
a) Aesthetic practices- making group sculptures that are situated and changed over time in varying locations in the garden. Making group paintings on large pieces of soaked calico cloth.
b) Gardening practices- pruning back, planting, watering and composting as a process of continued renewal.
c) Through movements, gestures, pauses either directly connected to the practices above or as a domestic immersion into an outdoor space in the tempo of going from one place to another, noticing things, stopping and then continuing.
In this manner to open up and fine-tune a sensitivity to sounds, forms, rhythms and a play of light and shadow that become useful through a continued involvement over time with the gestures and movements of others.
To use all these practices as methods of activation and rest in order to create a context for social living.
1. To operate this social context through either doing things or choosing at any time not to do things and to create platforms of rest between events that are important because they are familiar and repeated. That could involve sitting in chairs, drinking tea or walking quietly in the garden.
2. In this way to create a liveable domestic and creative environment that is held together by a combination of verbal and non-verbal episodes, of “Social” and “Non-social” moments as supportive of one another in making a viable living-space.
3. In this manner to work in an ecological way both with the place we find ourselves in and with the rhythms of immersion and separation through which autistic people maintain an on-going contribution whether at any one instance that is in a practice that seems to be “Social” or “Autistic”.
4. To use this practice of living environments as a way to ask questions about integration by building up such environments through sharing, enlarging and transforming the personal practices of a diverse range of people. To create through this an attention of responsiveness to all gesture, movement and position.
5. Therefore rather than implementing a functional model of what is appropriate and instructing those who do not fit in how to modify behaviour, to allow actions to influence one another in a fluid and non-goal orientated way.
6. In this way to encourage a fundamental acceptance of different styles of learning, experiencing and sensing by making these practices open to everyone as part of a contribution to a changing whole.
7. In this way to accept difference and so to include one another as an aspect of life.
End.
Memory Gardens Autistic Project
Legard Road, N5, Highbury and Islington
London
2001-2009
*With thanks to Action for Children on whose land this project became possible.
AIMS
1. To provide an on-going habitat that integrates many movements.
2. To allow a place of return so that the changing tempo of some of these cycles of movement can be known and influenced by the actions and sensibility of all visitors and participants.
3. To put central to an environment the agents- human, animal and vegetable- that makes that environment.
4. To allow some of the human agents-autistic members and those with a history of mental health issues- to be central to this process of gradual change and modification so that they instigate the process through:
a) Aesthetic practices- making group sculptures that are situated and changed over time in varying locations in the garden. Making group paintings on large pieces of soaked calico cloth.
b) Gardening practices- pruning back, planting, watering and composting as a process of continued renewal.
c) Through movements, gestures, pauses either directly connected to the practices above or as a domestic immersion into an outdoor space in the tempo of going from one place to another, noticing things, stopping and then continuing.
In this manner to open up and fine-tune a sensitivity to sounds, forms, rhythms and a play of light and shadow that become useful through a continued involvement over time with the gestures and movements of others.
To use all these practices as methods of activation and rest in order to create a context for social living.
1. To operate this social context through either doing things or choosing at any time not to do things and to create platforms of rest between events that are important because they are familiar and repeated. That could involve sitting in chairs, drinking tea or walking quietly in the garden.
2. In this way to create a liveable domestic and creative environment that is held together by a combination of verbal and non-verbal episodes, of “Social” and “Non-social” moments as supportive of one another in making a viable living-space.
3. In this manner to work in an ecological way both with the place we find ourselves in and with the rhythms of immersion and separation through which autistic people maintain an on-going contribution whether at any one instance that is in a practice that seems to be “Social” or “Autistic”.
4. To use this practice of living environments as a way to ask questions about integration by building up such environments through sharing, enlarging and transforming the personal practices of a diverse range of people. To create through this an attention of responsiveness to all gesture, movement and position.
5. Therefore rather than implementing a functional model of what is appropriate and instructing those who do not fit in how to modify behaviour, to allow actions to influence one another in a fluid and non-goal orientated way.
6. In this way to encourage a fundamental acceptance of different styles of learning, experiencing and sensing by making these practices open to everyone as part of a contribution to a changing whole.
7. In this way to accept difference and so to include one another as an aspect of life.
End.
Memory Gardens Autistic Project
Legard Road, N5, Highbury and Islington
London
2001-2009
*With thanks to Action for Children on whose land this project became possible.
User Group Statement
“Memory Gardens” Statement as agreed by the Users Group
Sept 13th 2007
1. “Memory Gardens” has been providing a long running and current wide-ranging service to the community including:
a) A youth club for children between the ages of eight and fourteen on the high end of the Autistic Spectrum.
b) An Art and Gardening course for Autistic adults and local people to meet at, and through which they can work together.
c) An Artist Retreat and respite space for individuals to visit, who are affected by a spectrum disorder such as Autism, Dyslexia or ADHD.
2. We hope to continue providing this service from the current site until the Garden is needed for an active process of re-development.
3. If NCH has secured plans for re-development of the site by March 2007 “Memory Gardens” will be happy to leave the site for continuation of the Project elsewhere. This ties in with our current funding obligations.
4. If our access to the site via the car-park to the now vacant NCH Legard Family Support Unit creates difficulty for NCH, we could suggest an alternate access route via the neighbouring Peter Bedford project, who would be willing to work with both our project and NCH to ensure the smooth running of this arrangement and to help with security.
5. Acceptable levels of security and access are essential to the safe running of the project. Maintaining this is seen as a priority.
6. “Memory Gardens” will continue to maintain close links with the local Community and authorities in order to safegaurd the smooth running of the project until a time when it is prepared for change of use.
Active participants and on-going advisors in this process of consultation will continue to be:
a) The Peter Bedford Mental Health Project- whose members are involved in our adult courses.
b) The NAS ( National Autistic Society)
c) Hoffman De Visme- whose members attend our adult courses.
d) Representatives from our Parents Group.
e) City and Islington College who have in the past funded and monitored our courses.
7. We continue to invite the open and interactive participation of NCH in our ongoing project in order to support a culture of mutual understanding.
“We the Undersigned (representatives) of “Memory Gardens” agree to the use of our names as signatories of the current Statement of Action for the running of “Memory Gardens”.
Margaret Schoffield
Jamie Pike
Molly Porter
Eloina Alvarez
Adrian Wyatt
Becky Periman
Ruth Solomon
Date of Meeting: 13.9.07, 1.30pm-3.30pm
Location: “Memory Gardens” Legard Rd, London N5.
Sept 13th 2007
1. “Memory Gardens” has been providing a long running and current wide-ranging service to the community including:
a) A youth club for children between the ages of eight and fourteen on the high end of the Autistic Spectrum.
b) An Art and Gardening course for Autistic adults and local people to meet at, and through which they can work together.
c) An Artist Retreat and respite space for individuals to visit, who are affected by a spectrum disorder such as Autism, Dyslexia or ADHD.
2. We hope to continue providing this service from the current site until the Garden is needed for an active process of re-development.
3. If NCH has secured plans for re-development of the site by March 2007 “Memory Gardens” will be happy to leave the site for continuation of the Project elsewhere. This ties in with our current funding obligations.
4. If our access to the site via the car-park to the now vacant NCH Legard Family Support Unit creates difficulty for NCH, we could suggest an alternate access route via the neighbouring Peter Bedford project, who would be willing to work with both our project and NCH to ensure the smooth running of this arrangement and to help with security.
5. Acceptable levels of security and access are essential to the safe running of the project. Maintaining this is seen as a priority.
6. “Memory Gardens” will continue to maintain close links with the local Community and authorities in order to safegaurd the smooth running of the project until a time when it is prepared for change of use.
Active participants and on-going advisors in this process of consultation will continue to be:
a) The Peter Bedford Mental Health Project- whose members are involved in our adult courses.
b) The NAS ( National Autistic Society)
c) Hoffman De Visme- whose members attend our adult courses.
d) Representatives from our Parents Group.
e) City and Islington College who have in the past funded and monitored our courses.
7. We continue to invite the open and interactive participation of NCH in our ongoing project in order to support a culture of mutual understanding.
“We the Undersigned (representatives) of “Memory Gardens” agree to the use of our names as signatories of the current Statement of Action for the running of “Memory Gardens”.
Margaret Schoffield
Jamie Pike
Molly Porter
Eloina Alvarez
Adrian Wyatt
Becky Periman
Ruth Solomon
Date of Meeting: 13.9.07, 1.30pm-3.30pm
Location: “Memory Gardens” Legard Rd, London N5.
License to Occupy
THIS AGREEMENT is made the [day] day of [month] 200[year]
BETWEEN:
(1) NCH of 85 Highbury park Registration number 1097940 and
(2) Ruth Solomon on behalf of the Memory Garden project of 23 Springfield London E5 9EF "the Licensee")
1 DEFINITIONS
In this Agreement unless the context otherwise requires the following expressions shall have the following meanings:
Property"
the property of the Licensor known as Legard House, Legard Road
"Designated Area"
The garden area called the Memory Garden to the rear of the building known as Legard House.
"Accessways"
"such roads paths entrance halls corridors lifts staircases landings and other means of access in or upon the Property the use of which is necessary for obtaining access to and egress from the Designated Area as the Licensor may from time to time reasonably specify on 7 days notice to the Licensee
Permitted Hours"
6am to 8 pm daily
“Permitted Use”
For use as a gardening and art project in conjunction with the Memory Garden’s statement of intent.
“Licence Fee”
There is no fee
"Licence Period"
From 1st October 2007 to 31st March 2008 or the date on which this lease is determined in accordance with the provision of clause 4 below
2 LICENCE
2.1 The Licensor hereby grants the Licensee this Licence to use the Designated Area which expression shall include all fixtures and fittings plant and machinery thereon together with and excepting and reserving the rights mentioned in the Schedule to hold the same unto the Licensee for the Licence Period for the Licensee to use during the Permitted Hours for the Permitted Use
3 LICENSEE'S COVENANTS
The Licensee agrees and undertakes:
3.1 To keep the Designated Area clean and tidy and clear of rubbish
3.2 Not to use the Designated Area other than for the Permitted Use or in such a way as to cause any nuisance disturbance annoyance inconvenience or interference to the Licensor or to the Property or any use of adjoining or neighbouring property
3.3 To indemnify the Licensor and keep the Licensor indemnified against all losses claims demands actions proceedings damages costs or expenses or other liabilities arising in any way from this Licence except where caused by the fault of the Licensor its servants or agents) any breach of the Licensee's undertakings contained in this clause or the exercise or the purported exercise of any of the rights given in clause 2
3.4 To observe such reasonable rules and regulations as the Licensor may make and of which the Licensor shall notify the Licensee from time to time governing the Licensee's use of the Designated Area or the Accessways
3.6 To leave the Designated Area in a clean and tidy condition free from the Licensee's furniture equipment and goods at the end of the Licence Period and take whatever plants installed by the Memory garden for its future use.
3.7 To make good any damage caused to the Designated Area and the Accessways caused by the Licensee or any person thereon with the express or implied authority of the Licensee
3.8 Not to obstruct the Accessways or cause the same to be dirty or untidy nor to leave any rubbish on them
3.9 Not to do suffer or permit any act matter or thing which would or might constitute or breach of any statutory requirement bylaw or regulation affecting the Property or which would or might vitiate in whole or in part any insurance effected by the Licensor in respect of the Property from time to time
3.10 Not to make any alteration or addition whatsoever to the Designated Area save that the Licensee may use the Designated Area in conjuction with it’s aims and objectives as a Memory garden.
3.11 To insure its equipment situated at the Designated Area against loss by any means including fire and theft
3.12 To indemnify the Licensor against all liability loss damage costs and expenses of whatsoever nature in respect of any breach of the Licensee's covenants in this Licence resulting in the injury (including injury resulting in death) to any person carried by any act default omissions or negligence of the Licensee or its invitees
3.13 Not to act in such a way that any third party obtains or may obtain rights over or in respect of the Designated Area so that any rights enjoyed by the Designated Area may be limited or extinguished
3.14 Not to exhibit any advertisement signboard nameplate inscription flag banner placard or poster upon any part of the Designated Area except with the previous written consent of the Licensor.
3.15 To permit the Licensor its servants agents and employees to enter the Designated Area at any time upon reasonable notice being given or immediately in the case of emergency for any purpose whatsoever
4 TERMINATION
The rights granted in clause 2 shall determine (without prejudice to the Licensor's rights in respect of any antecedent breach) immediately on notice given by the Licensor at any time following any breach of the Licensee's covenants contained in clause 3 or if the Licensee has a receiver appointed or enters into liquidation or upon 14 days notice otherwise
5 ASSIGNMENT
This Agreement is personal to the Licensee and is not assignable and the rights set out in clause 2 may only be exercised by the Licensee its employees and properly authorised invitees
6 GENERAL
6.1 The Licensor gives no warranty that the Designated Area is legally or physically fit for the Permitted Use. There is no electricity. Water must be provided independently by the Memory garden as any water on or adjacent to the site is unfit for use.
6.2 The Licensor shall not be liable for the death or injury to any person or for damage to any property of or for any losses claims demands actions proceedings damages costs or expenses or other liability incurred by the Licensee in the exercise or purported exercise of the rights granted by clause 2 except where caused by the fault of the Licensor its servants or agents.
6.3 All notices under this Licence shall be sufficiently served if communicated in writing to the Licensee at [address] and to the Licensor at [address] or such other address as either the Licensor or Licensee shall inform the other from time to time
6.4 The Licensee shall not be entitled to exclusive occupation possession or use of the Designated Area and shall not at any time or in any manner do any act which may impede the Licensor or any person authorised by the Licensor in the exercise of the Licensor's rights of possession and control of the Property
SIGNED by
for and on behalf of the Licensor
SIGNED by
for and on behalf of the Licensee
BETWEEN:
(1) NCH of 85 Highbury park Registration number 1097940 and
(2) Ruth Solomon on behalf of the Memory Garden project of 23 Springfield London E5 9EF "the Licensee")
1 DEFINITIONS
In this Agreement unless the context otherwise requires the following expressions shall have the following meanings:
Property"
the property of the Licensor known as Legard House, Legard Road
"Designated Area"
The garden area called the Memory Garden to the rear of the building known as Legard House.
"Accessways"
"such roads paths entrance halls corridors lifts staircases landings and other means of access in or upon the Property the use of which is necessary for obtaining access to and egress from the Designated Area as the Licensor may from time to time reasonably specify on 7 days notice to the Licensee
Permitted Hours"
6am to 8 pm daily
“Permitted Use”
For use as a gardening and art project in conjunction with the Memory Garden’s statement of intent.
“Licence Fee”
There is no fee
"Licence Period"
From 1st October 2007 to 31st March 2008 or the date on which this lease is determined in accordance with the provision of clause 4 below
2 LICENCE
2.1 The Licensor hereby grants the Licensee this Licence to use the Designated Area which expression shall include all fixtures and fittings plant and machinery thereon together with and excepting and reserving the rights mentioned in the Schedule to hold the same unto the Licensee for the Licence Period for the Licensee to use during the Permitted Hours for the Permitted Use
3 LICENSEE'S COVENANTS
The Licensee agrees and undertakes:
3.1 To keep the Designated Area clean and tidy and clear of rubbish
3.2 Not to use the Designated Area other than for the Permitted Use or in such a way as to cause any nuisance disturbance annoyance inconvenience or interference to the Licensor or to the Property or any use of adjoining or neighbouring property
3.3 To indemnify the Licensor and keep the Licensor indemnified against all losses claims demands actions proceedings damages costs or expenses or other liabilities arising in any way from this Licence except where caused by the fault of the Licensor its servants or agents) any breach of the Licensee's undertakings contained in this clause or the exercise or the purported exercise of any of the rights given in clause 2
3.4 To observe such reasonable rules and regulations as the Licensor may make and of which the Licensor shall notify the Licensee from time to time governing the Licensee's use of the Designated Area or the Accessways
3.6 To leave the Designated Area in a clean and tidy condition free from the Licensee's furniture equipment and goods at the end of the Licence Period and take whatever plants installed by the Memory garden for its future use.
3.7 To make good any damage caused to the Designated Area and the Accessways caused by the Licensee or any person thereon with the express or implied authority of the Licensee
3.8 Not to obstruct the Accessways or cause the same to be dirty or untidy nor to leave any rubbish on them
3.9 Not to do suffer or permit any act matter or thing which would or might constitute or breach of any statutory requirement bylaw or regulation affecting the Property or which would or might vitiate in whole or in part any insurance effected by the Licensor in respect of the Property from time to time
3.10 Not to make any alteration or addition whatsoever to the Designated Area save that the Licensee may use the Designated Area in conjuction with it’s aims and objectives as a Memory garden.
3.11 To insure its equipment situated at the Designated Area against loss by any means including fire and theft
3.12 To indemnify the Licensor against all liability loss damage costs and expenses of whatsoever nature in respect of any breach of the Licensee's covenants in this Licence resulting in the injury (including injury resulting in death) to any person carried by any act default omissions or negligence of the Licensee or its invitees
3.13 Not to act in such a way that any third party obtains or may obtain rights over or in respect of the Designated Area so that any rights enjoyed by the Designated Area may be limited or extinguished
3.14 Not to exhibit any advertisement signboard nameplate inscription flag banner placard or poster upon any part of the Designated Area except with the previous written consent of the Licensor.
3.15 To permit the Licensor its servants agents and employees to enter the Designated Area at any time upon reasonable notice being given or immediately in the case of emergency for any purpose whatsoever
4 TERMINATION
The rights granted in clause 2 shall determine (without prejudice to the Licensor's rights in respect of any antecedent breach) immediately on notice given by the Licensor at any time following any breach of the Licensee's covenants contained in clause 3 or if the Licensee has a receiver appointed or enters into liquidation or upon 14 days notice otherwise
5 ASSIGNMENT
This Agreement is personal to the Licensee and is not assignable and the rights set out in clause 2 may only be exercised by the Licensee its employees and properly authorised invitees
6 GENERAL
6.1 The Licensor gives no warranty that the Designated Area is legally or physically fit for the Permitted Use. There is no electricity. Water must be provided independently by the Memory garden as any water on or adjacent to the site is unfit for use.
6.2 The Licensor shall not be liable for the death or injury to any person or for damage to any property of or for any losses claims demands actions proceedings damages costs or expenses or other liability incurred by the Licensee in the exercise or purported exercise of the rights granted by clause 2 except where caused by the fault of the Licensor its servants or agents.
6.3 All notices under this Licence shall be sufficiently served if communicated in writing to the Licensee at [address] and to the Licensor at [address] or such other address as either the Licensor or Licensee shall inform the other from time to time
6.4 The Licensee shall not be entitled to exclusive occupation possession or use of the Designated Area and shall not at any time or in any manner do any act which may impede the Licensor or any person authorised by the Licensor in the exercise of the Licensor's rights of possession and control of the Property
SIGNED by
for and on behalf of the Licensor
SIGNED by
for and on behalf of the Licensee
To Reverand Will Morrey, Trustee to NCH
Reverand Will Morrey
South Wales District Chair
12 Llwyn-y-grant rd
Cardiff
CF23 9ET
Sep 28 2007
Dear Reverand Morrey,
A meeting took place between myself, Barbara Peacock, Nigel Harper, Andrew Mchardy and another member of Memory Gardens, Becky Perriman on Sept.6 at 2.30pm. It was put back from an August meeting because people went on holiday.
It was not a comfortable meeting. In fact I felt bullied and cornered.
There were many cross-references, abrupt endings, interuptions and word manoevering which quite frankly left Becky and I not knowing the full content of the words that played out.
There were accusations of misconduct made towards me.
The land has been left unprotected since the Legard Family Centre closed and I am juggling running courses and managing local youths who now regulary break in. I am also trying to ensure access through a system- which has now broken down- whereby I collect keys from London Regional office in order to gain entry to the garden.
These keys were no longer there one day when I went to pick them up at the office. No explanation was given. Another set for weekend access did not work. Everyone was on holiday. I needed to get in because I have obligations to my members and this access was promised. So I made a decision to use a spare key that I had cut as a precaution because I know that these situations arise. I am glad I did this because otherwise I would not have fulfilled my responsibilty towards the project during what now turns out to be our last summer at the garden. Did I act moraly or not? Of course NCH representatives think not, but it it not as clear-cut as that.
The decision I made to keep the garden open by making a spare key is now incriminating me and this is being used as a way of putting pressure on us to come to an early agreement on closure or otherwise to face the humiliation of being escorted down by a security gaurd whenever we wish to use the site. No community could flourish or even endure under such scrutiny. I do not know why NCH could not have trusted me as the co-ordinator of the project with a key in the first place, which would have avoided all this insult and counter insult. The keys have now been replaced but responsibility for what went wrong is not evenly shared by NCH.
The basis of the arangement is now mistrust. All my suggestions to work together are now conditional on NCH securing a date of our departure. The idea that I put forward to Clare Tickel to annex the land with Peter Bedford Mental Health project whose members attend our courses has been disregarded.
It is as I had thought in the worst case scenario. It is a “Them” and “Us” mentality with NCH trying to isolate and shame us into disapearing as quickly as possible- as if we were never really there.
I took Becky along because she knows our project inside out. She has participated creatively in the adult courses and now works with the autistic young people on a Sunday. She is an excellent qualified play-worker flowing imaginatively in and out of their physical and mental rhythms; holding and extending their sense of presence. To see her shouted down by people who ought to know better or at least ought to have better manners, shocked me. I felt pain for bringing her.
Only after the meeting when as an after thought Barbara and Andrew agreed to visit the Garden, as in fact they had promised to do, was there any kind of equal footing. Then we could be the hosts and in that short walking tour we could all become more disposed to one another as the garden guided and paced us- as it has done for our members over the years.
But already this walk and brief affinity was only made possible in their eyes because the goal of termination was in sight.
Deep down we hold so many of the same core values but these can not be acknowledged because the representatives of NCH meeting with us feel that this would lose them time. Then to hear Nigel Harper say he regrets we were ever given permission to exist is surprising in its bluntness and it hurts.
Experience becomes good or bad by people`s shared outlook. It is not right that this outlook should be made by people who will not share in the experience or admit to sharing in it.
I deeply regret the way this ending is being played out by NCH. It is not representative of the day to day reality that is being lived out in the garden right now, which is one which is supportive in the best way it can be. We are not perfect, but we exist.
I need to tell you how I am feeling in this letter because rightly or wrongly I have come to associate you as a keeper of the whole picture. I hope this does not inconvenience you.
I am not expecting an intervention but I do want this to be on record as my version of the story as it is unfolding. Undoubtedly you will have other versions too.
Thanks,
Sincerely,
Ruth Solomon
Co-ordinator, Memory Gardens
Legard rd, N5 London
South Wales District Chair
12 Llwyn-y-grant rd
Cardiff
CF23 9ET
Sep 28 2007
Dear Reverand Morrey,
A meeting took place between myself, Barbara Peacock, Nigel Harper, Andrew Mchardy and another member of Memory Gardens, Becky Perriman on Sept.6 at 2.30pm. It was put back from an August meeting because people went on holiday.
It was not a comfortable meeting. In fact I felt bullied and cornered.
There were many cross-references, abrupt endings, interuptions and word manoevering which quite frankly left Becky and I not knowing the full content of the words that played out.
There were accusations of misconduct made towards me.
The land has been left unprotected since the Legard Family Centre closed and I am juggling running courses and managing local youths who now regulary break in. I am also trying to ensure access through a system- which has now broken down- whereby I collect keys from London Regional office in order to gain entry to the garden.
These keys were no longer there one day when I went to pick them up at the office. No explanation was given. Another set for weekend access did not work. Everyone was on holiday. I needed to get in because I have obligations to my members and this access was promised. So I made a decision to use a spare key that I had cut as a precaution because I know that these situations arise. I am glad I did this because otherwise I would not have fulfilled my responsibilty towards the project during what now turns out to be our last summer at the garden. Did I act moraly or not? Of course NCH representatives think not, but it it not as clear-cut as that.
The decision I made to keep the garden open by making a spare key is now incriminating me and this is being used as a way of putting pressure on us to come to an early agreement on closure or otherwise to face the humiliation of being escorted down by a security gaurd whenever we wish to use the site. No community could flourish or even endure under such scrutiny. I do not know why NCH could not have trusted me as the co-ordinator of the project with a key in the first place, which would have avoided all this insult and counter insult. The keys have now been replaced but responsibility for what went wrong is not evenly shared by NCH.
The basis of the arangement is now mistrust. All my suggestions to work together are now conditional on NCH securing a date of our departure. The idea that I put forward to Clare Tickel to annex the land with Peter Bedford Mental Health project whose members attend our courses has been disregarded.
It is as I had thought in the worst case scenario. It is a “Them” and “Us” mentality with NCH trying to isolate and shame us into disapearing as quickly as possible- as if we were never really there.
I took Becky along because she knows our project inside out. She has participated creatively in the adult courses and now works with the autistic young people on a Sunday. She is an excellent qualified play-worker flowing imaginatively in and out of their physical and mental rhythms; holding and extending their sense of presence. To see her shouted down by people who ought to know better or at least ought to have better manners, shocked me. I felt pain for bringing her.
Only after the meeting when as an after thought Barbara and Andrew agreed to visit the Garden, as in fact they had promised to do, was there any kind of equal footing. Then we could be the hosts and in that short walking tour we could all become more disposed to one another as the garden guided and paced us- as it has done for our members over the years.
But already this walk and brief affinity was only made possible in their eyes because the goal of termination was in sight.
Deep down we hold so many of the same core values but these can not be acknowledged because the representatives of NCH meeting with us feel that this would lose them time. Then to hear Nigel Harper say he regrets we were ever given permission to exist is surprising in its bluntness and it hurts.
Experience becomes good or bad by people`s shared outlook. It is not right that this outlook should be made by people who will not share in the experience or admit to sharing in it.
I deeply regret the way this ending is being played out by NCH. It is not representative of the day to day reality that is being lived out in the garden right now, which is one which is supportive in the best way it can be. We are not perfect, but we exist.
I need to tell you how I am feeling in this letter because rightly or wrongly I have come to associate you as a keeper of the whole picture. I hope this does not inconvenience you.
I am not expecting an intervention but I do want this to be on record as my version of the story as it is unfolding. Undoubtedly you will have other versions too.
Thanks,
Sincerely,
Ruth Solomon
Co-ordinator, Memory Gardens
Legard rd, N5 London
Leaping Between certainties
23 Oct 2008
How can we begin with the minutiae of what people do and not use it as a distraction but as a fundamental component of learning?
How do people learn? How do autistic people learn?
Are they manually activating a synaptic leap- leaping into the unknown with the faith they will reach the other side- half flying half propelling- using surfaces like parkhor experts who gain footholds on railings, slopes and banisters- feeling out the landscape according to utility in a mobile navigation.
Response is about responsiveness but this needs to be activated- it is not up and running but needs to be practised. The brain and the body is not a self defining unit. Nor is it fully formed at birth. There is a learning interchange where our endings become the open circuit to something else. Systems are forged together- slammed together- cobbled together- conjoint systems that create momentary vacuums like the air trapped between the clap of two hands- impossible to know or elicit that sound without the ensuing action- the speed of this coming together- the bounce or a coming undone- two directives exploding into sound- that is a crafting immersed in the moment.
Autism is a learning program- the questions it opens up is about how we learn. It is an enactment of a process of activation. The techniques of autism- spinning, flicking, bouncing- stimming- momentary explosions of sound – composed sensory overloads that create threshold responses and send the parkour leaper into oblivion and over to the other side. A monitoring of synaptic firings that otherwise never get going or double and redouble into a labyrinth that if unchecked would tangle into immobility.
How to use that excess- the never-ending multiplication to go somewhere- or else to cobble together resonating chambers- informational pockets that reverberate and echo and harvest their own bifurcations.
Interesting. How do we learn from our own learning- from the strata of responses in between the chosen and accredited pitch frequencies or the colour red or blue? How to mix the palette and have it mean something even when it is not translatable into a chronological scale?
Memory- How to mix up events- rotate ourselves into different composite support structures that somehow lean up against one another and before collapsing, or moving on into a different sculpture, recognise position.
This has to be done from within the situation itself- from the practices already underway. Physically enacting ones own synaptic firing system can be exhausting as the testimony of any autistic person and their periods of over bearing tiredness, irritability, anger and melt-down will tell you.
Environments need to be sounding boards- open circuits for momentary inclusion that activates not only one synapse, one person, one surface but a network of inter-activating responses that can hold one another in a certain charge, and then allow for rest, for a period of release from a necessary but provisional constraint.
Sensitivity can be used when navigation is an on-going enquiry into multiple dimensions- objects are never closed- nor are persons- they come into existence and become what they are as the seal of a contact is made- like the articulation of the vocal chords through a certain pressure chamber in the labyrinth and the elastic mobility of the lips that seal, purse, puck and then allow in to the body a fresh trail of air at just the right moment. Soundings are crafted, sculpted in this way, in tandem with our need to take in air and redistribute its components according to what is most useable by our systems.
From gesture to sound to thought to expression- an interflow that is not causal but a simultaneous generation of one to another- the pressing into place of a haptic patterned circuit- a modulation of depth through an active gaging that is mediated from opposing sides.Where is the surface- the wall, the skin, the organ of apperception? It is situated through alignments which is a staged forging of space.
Perspective is a meaningless abstraction that depends on our pretending that the body could ever be still.
Waiting at a platform for a train- bodies jostle, sway- accommodate a further jet of passengers from the stairwell. The signal lights, rumble of the tracks- we sway from foot to foot, not together as one unit but accommodating one another into sudden absences and fillings. The on-off pump is enacted at every level from the infinitesimally small to the gross and through it all we realise our presence- a molecular adaptation of indentations and incursions- fingers, eye-brows, slight rockings from the balls of our feet to our toes- ankle bones bracing and giving way- hips re-angling into minute tilts and inversions reapropriating the bulk of our standing weight. Gasps of air flooding systems and transgressing borders to bond with blood and become, what essentially they are not. But just because it is not that outside our bodies does not mean it is not that inside our bodies. We are systems of negotiation spanning impossible islands. To be upright- to be more or less still is a continual set of tiny tectonic shifts and compromises. We are crafting that integrity all the time through near falls, by sacrificing the integrity of impossible categories.
Boats on the river Thames- muddy water in the dark, picking up and reflecting out lights from the towering glass buildings all around. The bridge that spans a section of the river- lit up red on one façade- that red tumbling into the water- colouring it without ever penetrating it.
Could the boats be stilled- manufactured never to move even with the distractions of continual ebbs and flows, currents and jetties that constantly pile up the water in localised enclaves and cause it to crash and collapse in on itself? The idea is ludicrous to create an absolutely still boat. The only still boat is a sunken boat- one lying at the bottom of the muddy river where the water fills every space – caresses and wears away the very outline that describes it as a boat until it barely resembles it- certainly does not function as one.
Into City Hall- a conference on Autism hosted by the TV presenter Jon Snow who finally gets up from behind the table and whose mobile presence encourages debate, along with the chromatised colour tie- that is more of an activation than the material of some of the speakers.But it is hard to still a debate in this way between the polar opposites between a “Cure” campaign and a “We exist” campaign.
Hosted in the name of a school, it is in the name of schooling that the debate needs to configure. Not “cure us” or “accept us for who we are” but engage in the minutiae of the practices that are undertaken as a way of activating on-going awareness; on-going presence. There needs to be a questioning of what it actually takes to be present- of the price paid for a kind of immobile myth of distance learning- of concepts before experience, of uprightness before modulation. Of the impossible dream of a presentation of functionality with everything else erased or discouraged in the schooling process. Would we be left with any kind of adaptable system if this were the goal? Can we abstract sociability, sitting behind desks, asking for what we want, without the complex and mediated interface of a haptic negotiating- an on-going plasticity of word and deed and thought and form? Of an always bargained for presence?
If we look at this level of activity, even in the supposedly non-normative we may find the filaments of a system that can work and adapt, renew and alter- in other words of a learning system. When it is recognised as such, encouraged and furthered as such it becomes this.
How do we employ the countless acts that are put outside of learning- the distractions when we are looking out the window at the play of lights on the river, the feel of the soft pad of our fingers against the grained wood of a desk, the rise and fall of voices that do not agree as a kind of musicality, the tensile muscles, slightly aching in the small of our back and their connection to our neck muscles keeping our head up. Our chest, our breathing pattern, our air passages. The gravitational shifts as we tilt our head from side to side to try to stay awake. And through all this a reattribution of our sense of looking- a perception that goes all the way through the body and shifts and adapts between muscle and bone and organ as we too adapt and shift between ourselves even far from the point of touch.
How do we let these things in as meaningful without every interaction becoming so intense as to be unbearable? Here is the crux of the debate- a question of consciousness. Of how we honestly manage ourselves and others. Of how we behave and acknowledge the connections, even across vast chasms of identity and of people and of ways of being seemingly different from ourselves.
How much more would the debate shift and modulate to accommodate and make use of these differences if we were all moving- constantly arriving like a never ending influx from the stairwell that is a curvature a continual arrival as people descend, wrapping around the glass interior of city hall in order to occupy their chosen and fixed seats.
Is that final arrangement workable for the leap that is needed between the “cure us” and the “we exist” camps? Would not a different configuration work better- one which mirrors the practices of activation so necessary and literal to autistic people and at every level to all forms of creative and mobile learning?
What about making a learning environment within the flowing spiral inside out-ness of city hall, which lets in the river whilst embracing passers by on the river bank? Which lends itself to this poetic composition. Surely this inside-out approach that inspired the special practice of the architect who proposed such a building could be part of the learning experience as an on-going proposition. No longer a distraction of boats passing to the inner workings of focused utterances, but a literal metaphor for turning things over, navigation, mobility of course through constant adjustment and a working with environmental shifts as a way of guiding perception. Rather than spending energy locking out the random passing ship, the autistic heckler in the crowd, why not make such an element central.
What about a market place? Small sites of special interest known to autistic people in their art practices, spinning practices, haptic formulations, sculptural and bodily configurations displayed as a casual conglomeration of stalls where the space between the walking between stalls- grouped sitting areas, areas too to move in and move through are equally important.
To have that open space would mean that many more people who would be excluded from the seating arrangement and the need for verbally tuning in whilst continually and exhaustively repressing the activation from other sources of input could be involved- indeed central to a present research environment of actually happening practices.
Not only John with his coloured tie could move around, or the camera man, crouching, hopping and stooping to perceive but not to be perceived. Suddenly the entire environment could be put to use as a roaming pacing device for activating conversation in its broadest meaning. The camera and the reporter would roam as well picking up elements and engaging practitioners, autistic and not autistic, within this necessarily bubbling and chaotic market-place.Fragments would be picked up, other things slip through. Autists would present not their pathologies but their techniques for activating thought, meaning, memory; their special interests; their roaming focus. And research would be the conjoint coming together of these practitioners, neurologists, care workers, doctors, teachers, siblings. The definition of who the heckler became would constantly shift, from autist, to researcher, to teacher, to sibling in a democracy of dispersed practices that represented very many different takes on expertise. They would need to thrash it out together by entering into very many different platforms of experience. That would necessarily put different views of the world at a disadvantage and at an advantage at different times.
A working method would be developed through such encounters, rather than two already closed camps arguing their corners in static verbal exchanges that already discredit the foundation of certain types of mobile learning by the very seating arrangement.
Over the duration of such working practices, rather than pitching words against actions, “cure” against “let us be”, the them/us factions would become less clearly defined in an investigation of what it means to learn and how different learning systems have been fashioned from out of every day practice within the neurological, social, physical, environmental condition that each person find themselves belonging to would open up a discussion that implicated every person’s subjectivity- where the observer and the observed coincided.
This might open up the debate about how we can learn about learning and take ideas about awareness- about what it means to be social, to be thinking, to be feeling, to be human, out of their rather jaded boxes. For these do not do credit to any of our capabilities.
In this age of networked involvements, autism and haptic learning styles could be a way of exploring dispersed knowledge systems, not of re-enacting Wild West clean-up or shoot out programs between the untamed “Indian” and the law abiding “citizen”. Surely that particular story line has got us into enough problems already.
Autism is an excuse to open a discussion about how we develop rather than to close it up into criteria of those who can and those who can’t develop. It is a chance to ask questions about why and how we learn differently and given that we do learn differently ,how best to support learning in all its various capacities, formations and growths. It is at this recognition of differences in perception that learning necessarily deepens into various techniques for approaching age old human questions that we all share. In that sense we must all become continuous researchers of our own methods and practices and to use this as a basis for perceiving other practices and the ways of knowing that they open out.
Ruth Solomon
How can we begin with the minutiae of what people do and not use it as a distraction but as a fundamental component of learning?
How do people learn? How do autistic people learn?
Are they manually activating a synaptic leap- leaping into the unknown with the faith they will reach the other side- half flying half propelling- using surfaces like parkhor experts who gain footholds on railings, slopes and banisters- feeling out the landscape according to utility in a mobile navigation.
Response is about responsiveness but this needs to be activated- it is not up and running but needs to be practised. The brain and the body is not a self defining unit. Nor is it fully formed at birth. There is a learning interchange where our endings become the open circuit to something else. Systems are forged together- slammed together- cobbled together- conjoint systems that create momentary vacuums like the air trapped between the clap of two hands- impossible to know or elicit that sound without the ensuing action- the speed of this coming together- the bounce or a coming undone- two directives exploding into sound- that is a crafting immersed in the moment.
Autism is a learning program- the questions it opens up is about how we learn. It is an enactment of a process of activation. The techniques of autism- spinning, flicking, bouncing- stimming- momentary explosions of sound – composed sensory overloads that create threshold responses and send the parkour leaper into oblivion and over to the other side. A monitoring of synaptic firings that otherwise never get going or double and redouble into a labyrinth that if unchecked would tangle into immobility.
How to use that excess- the never-ending multiplication to go somewhere- or else to cobble together resonating chambers- informational pockets that reverberate and echo and harvest their own bifurcations.
Interesting. How do we learn from our own learning- from the strata of responses in between the chosen and accredited pitch frequencies or the colour red or blue? How to mix the palette and have it mean something even when it is not translatable into a chronological scale?
Memory- How to mix up events- rotate ourselves into different composite support structures that somehow lean up against one another and before collapsing, or moving on into a different sculpture, recognise position.
This has to be done from within the situation itself- from the practices already underway. Physically enacting ones own synaptic firing system can be exhausting as the testimony of any autistic person and their periods of over bearing tiredness, irritability, anger and melt-down will tell you.
Environments need to be sounding boards- open circuits for momentary inclusion that activates not only one synapse, one person, one surface but a network of inter-activating responses that can hold one another in a certain charge, and then allow for rest, for a period of release from a necessary but provisional constraint.
Sensitivity can be used when navigation is an on-going enquiry into multiple dimensions- objects are never closed- nor are persons- they come into existence and become what they are as the seal of a contact is made- like the articulation of the vocal chords through a certain pressure chamber in the labyrinth and the elastic mobility of the lips that seal, purse, puck and then allow in to the body a fresh trail of air at just the right moment. Soundings are crafted, sculpted in this way, in tandem with our need to take in air and redistribute its components according to what is most useable by our systems.
From gesture to sound to thought to expression- an interflow that is not causal but a simultaneous generation of one to another- the pressing into place of a haptic patterned circuit- a modulation of depth through an active gaging that is mediated from opposing sides.Where is the surface- the wall, the skin, the organ of apperception? It is situated through alignments which is a staged forging of space.
Perspective is a meaningless abstraction that depends on our pretending that the body could ever be still.
Waiting at a platform for a train- bodies jostle, sway- accommodate a further jet of passengers from the stairwell. The signal lights, rumble of the tracks- we sway from foot to foot, not together as one unit but accommodating one another into sudden absences and fillings. The on-off pump is enacted at every level from the infinitesimally small to the gross and through it all we realise our presence- a molecular adaptation of indentations and incursions- fingers, eye-brows, slight rockings from the balls of our feet to our toes- ankle bones bracing and giving way- hips re-angling into minute tilts and inversions reapropriating the bulk of our standing weight. Gasps of air flooding systems and transgressing borders to bond with blood and become, what essentially they are not. But just because it is not that outside our bodies does not mean it is not that inside our bodies. We are systems of negotiation spanning impossible islands. To be upright- to be more or less still is a continual set of tiny tectonic shifts and compromises. We are crafting that integrity all the time through near falls, by sacrificing the integrity of impossible categories.
Boats on the river Thames- muddy water in the dark, picking up and reflecting out lights from the towering glass buildings all around. The bridge that spans a section of the river- lit up red on one façade- that red tumbling into the water- colouring it without ever penetrating it.
Could the boats be stilled- manufactured never to move even with the distractions of continual ebbs and flows, currents and jetties that constantly pile up the water in localised enclaves and cause it to crash and collapse in on itself? The idea is ludicrous to create an absolutely still boat. The only still boat is a sunken boat- one lying at the bottom of the muddy river where the water fills every space – caresses and wears away the very outline that describes it as a boat until it barely resembles it- certainly does not function as one.
Into City Hall- a conference on Autism hosted by the TV presenter Jon Snow who finally gets up from behind the table and whose mobile presence encourages debate, along with the chromatised colour tie- that is more of an activation than the material of some of the speakers.But it is hard to still a debate in this way between the polar opposites between a “Cure” campaign and a “We exist” campaign.
Hosted in the name of a school, it is in the name of schooling that the debate needs to configure. Not “cure us” or “accept us for who we are” but engage in the minutiae of the practices that are undertaken as a way of activating on-going awareness; on-going presence. There needs to be a questioning of what it actually takes to be present- of the price paid for a kind of immobile myth of distance learning- of concepts before experience, of uprightness before modulation. Of the impossible dream of a presentation of functionality with everything else erased or discouraged in the schooling process. Would we be left with any kind of adaptable system if this were the goal? Can we abstract sociability, sitting behind desks, asking for what we want, without the complex and mediated interface of a haptic negotiating- an on-going plasticity of word and deed and thought and form? Of an always bargained for presence?
If we look at this level of activity, even in the supposedly non-normative we may find the filaments of a system that can work and adapt, renew and alter- in other words of a learning system. When it is recognised as such, encouraged and furthered as such it becomes this.
How do we employ the countless acts that are put outside of learning- the distractions when we are looking out the window at the play of lights on the river, the feel of the soft pad of our fingers against the grained wood of a desk, the rise and fall of voices that do not agree as a kind of musicality, the tensile muscles, slightly aching in the small of our back and their connection to our neck muscles keeping our head up. Our chest, our breathing pattern, our air passages. The gravitational shifts as we tilt our head from side to side to try to stay awake. And through all this a reattribution of our sense of looking- a perception that goes all the way through the body and shifts and adapts between muscle and bone and organ as we too adapt and shift between ourselves even far from the point of touch.
How do we let these things in as meaningful without every interaction becoming so intense as to be unbearable? Here is the crux of the debate- a question of consciousness. Of how we honestly manage ourselves and others. Of how we behave and acknowledge the connections, even across vast chasms of identity and of people and of ways of being seemingly different from ourselves.
How much more would the debate shift and modulate to accommodate and make use of these differences if we were all moving- constantly arriving like a never ending influx from the stairwell that is a curvature a continual arrival as people descend, wrapping around the glass interior of city hall in order to occupy their chosen and fixed seats.
Is that final arrangement workable for the leap that is needed between the “cure us” and the “we exist” camps? Would not a different configuration work better- one which mirrors the practices of activation so necessary and literal to autistic people and at every level to all forms of creative and mobile learning?
What about making a learning environment within the flowing spiral inside out-ness of city hall, which lets in the river whilst embracing passers by on the river bank? Which lends itself to this poetic composition. Surely this inside-out approach that inspired the special practice of the architect who proposed such a building could be part of the learning experience as an on-going proposition. No longer a distraction of boats passing to the inner workings of focused utterances, but a literal metaphor for turning things over, navigation, mobility of course through constant adjustment and a working with environmental shifts as a way of guiding perception. Rather than spending energy locking out the random passing ship, the autistic heckler in the crowd, why not make such an element central.
What about a market place? Small sites of special interest known to autistic people in their art practices, spinning practices, haptic formulations, sculptural and bodily configurations displayed as a casual conglomeration of stalls where the space between the walking between stalls- grouped sitting areas, areas too to move in and move through are equally important.
To have that open space would mean that many more people who would be excluded from the seating arrangement and the need for verbally tuning in whilst continually and exhaustively repressing the activation from other sources of input could be involved- indeed central to a present research environment of actually happening practices.
Not only John with his coloured tie could move around, or the camera man, crouching, hopping and stooping to perceive but not to be perceived. Suddenly the entire environment could be put to use as a roaming pacing device for activating conversation in its broadest meaning. The camera and the reporter would roam as well picking up elements and engaging practitioners, autistic and not autistic, within this necessarily bubbling and chaotic market-place.Fragments would be picked up, other things slip through. Autists would present not their pathologies but their techniques for activating thought, meaning, memory; their special interests; their roaming focus. And research would be the conjoint coming together of these practitioners, neurologists, care workers, doctors, teachers, siblings. The definition of who the heckler became would constantly shift, from autist, to researcher, to teacher, to sibling in a democracy of dispersed practices that represented very many different takes on expertise. They would need to thrash it out together by entering into very many different platforms of experience. That would necessarily put different views of the world at a disadvantage and at an advantage at different times.
A working method would be developed through such encounters, rather than two already closed camps arguing their corners in static verbal exchanges that already discredit the foundation of certain types of mobile learning by the very seating arrangement.
Over the duration of such working practices, rather than pitching words against actions, “cure” against “let us be”, the them/us factions would become less clearly defined in an investigation of what it means to learn and how different learning systems have been fashioned from out of every day practice within the neurological, social, physical, environmental condition that each person find themselves belonging to would open up a discussion that implicated every person’s subjectivity- where the observer and the observed coincided.
This might open up the debate about how we can learn about learning and take ideas about awareness- about what it means to be social, to be thinking, to be feeling, to be human, out of their rather jaded boxes. For these do not do credit to any of our capabilities.
In this age of networked involvements, autism and haptic learning styles could be a way of exploring dispersed knowledge systems, not of re-enacting Wild West clean-up or shoot out programs between the untamed “Indian” and the law abiding “citizen”. Surely that particular story line has got us into enough problems already.
Autism is an excuse to open a discussion about how we develop rather than to close it up into criteria of those who can and those who can’t develop. It is a chance to ask questions about why and how we learn differently and given that we do learn differently ,how best to support learning in all its various capacities, formations and growths. It is at this recognition of differences in perception that learning necessarily deepens into various techniques for approaching age old human questions that we all share. In that sense we must all become continuous researchers of our own methods and practices and to use this as a basis for perceiving other practices and the ways of knowing that they open out.
Ruth Solomon
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