Install and Abstract

Untitled

Lauren Simons, 2026

Chalk pastel, charcoal and acrylic paint pen on plywood

This body of work investigates perception as an embodied neurodivergent process and experience. For me drawing becomes a living record of cognition and sensation — what I have described as a kind of mind-map, a way of documenting what I see and what happens in my head as it unfolds. Rather than beginning with a predetermined outcome, the work develops through a position of not-knowing, allowing each work to emerge through chance, interruption, and iterative layering. The pencil acts less as a tool, and more as an extension of the body, enabling marks and notes that arise from touch and immediate attention, as well as memory and imagination. As layers accumulate marks, annotations and partial forms, the drawing registers shifts in sensory experience, tracing oscillations between focus and distortion.

As someone who experiences the world through borderline personality disorder and prosopagnosia (commonly know as facial blindness), my experience makes me more aware of perceptual instabilities. Prosopagnosia means that recognition cannot be taken for granted; faces and identities are visually distorted and jumbled, and are having to be assembled through familiar identifiers such as gesture, posture, clothing, movement, or spatial context, rather than through the face alone. Doing this can lead to a playful construction of a face or figure.

I become acutely aware of the physical environment because it provides the contextual cues that help support recognition and orientation. Rooms, architectural features, objects, and patterns of movement often become as significant as the people within them, contributing to how I navigate and interpret social encounters. Rather than perceiving faces and identities as immediately present, I experience it as gradually constructed through interactions of body and space, memory and imagination. My experience of borderline personality disorder further reinforces this way of inhabiting the world by intensifying emotional and interpersonal awareness, making spaces feel affectively charged and constantly shifting in thought and emotion, depending on spatial context and experience. Together, these experiences have led me to think of space as a relational and active site.

Reading ‘Architecture from Outside’ by Elizabeth Grosz, has influenced this enquiry into who is doing the experiencing. In this text, Grosz put emphasis on embodied experience by foregrounding the body as architecture’s invisible condition. She writes, “Bodies are absent in architecture, but they remain architecture’s unspoken condition.” positioning embodiment as an important aspect of spatial understanding. She asks who is inhabiting a space and how different individuals could produce different spatial experiences.

With this in mind, my research has developed from looking at visual depictions of an alternative way of seeing and perceiving, to how space can influence this alternative way of seeing, to now looking at ‘who’ is doing the viewing. These freestanding structures of various sizes are constructed with drawings influenced by prosopagnosia, and are installed into a space allowing the viewer to move around each drawing, making their own connections from one to the next.

Note: This finalised insall has spread out into more space.