Ellie Williams
"Mind Map"
Mind media collage
2022
Any artist attempting to comment on her work faces an inescapable irony, since for her, drawing comes before writing; and creating precedes talking. The language of images, colours, lines and marks will always reach the brain before a word or sentence.
Since I am dyslexic, this is especially true for me. As a child, my writing was mirrored, and I needed an alternative visual language.
At university, instead of finding myself in the giant library art section, I instead became immersed in the medical part amongst brain scans, reading wave charts, and gazing at rainbow neuron images.
The time spent drawing images of the brain was a struggle to make representational sense of internal complexities. My development as an artist began with a preoccupation with portraiture, heads and then brains. My confusion around language became expressed in repeated portrayals of a baby’s head and brains.
These images in time became increasingly abstract. Similar shapes mirrored in the natural world came to represent neural themes to me: The tendrils of seaweed and branches merged with neuron images in my mind, and craters and crescents of the moon with brain scans and the shape of a cranium.
These tendrils reach for fuller
understanding and wholeness within my brain and within the world.
Themes of blurring around the sensory and cognitive elements in the brain,
sometimes, one side of the brain is often shrouded in darkness, like the moon.
My collaging of themes and images is both a literal and metaphorical expression of my striving to glue together ideas and understanding – a struggle to piece together and make sense of my feelings; and perhaps to better integrate the two sides of a dyslexic brain.
I have come full circle since childhood and am now a mother supporting my own neurodiverse daughter through the world of words. I hope she can see the strength that can be found in expression through art, however one’s brain may function.
