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
Saturday, 21 August 2010
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
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