In Praise of Fidgetting! Portraits over zoom

Chuffed to have my fist commissioned piece shown at the online Unlimited! Festival via Southbank this last week. (Its audio described and captioned too)

https://coventry2021.co.uk/reform-the-norm-micro-commissions/hayley-williams-hindle/

Single line drawing of a beautiful friend, sketched while on zoom gathering

“During lockdown, I have been embracing the singular possibilities of Zoom meetings and managing my ADHD by drawing impulsively during them. I draw my response to the faces on screen. (But claim no merit in technique!) The images of these lockdown doodles are accompanied by a voiced reflective response to my own Neurodiverse experience of the world - specifically here, ADHD. The video starts with the last 6 minutes of the 3rd movement of Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto in D, and its accompanying sound wave. Observers are invited to experience the music with paper and something to mark make with, and to record their response to the sound and the movement and colour on screen in whatever way feels most instinctive. The viewer is thereby drawn in to an empathic experience of having a mind driven by a neurochemical difference.

“Making this piece for Unlimited and Coventry City of Culture Trust has been a wonderfully freeing process of leaning into my experiential world and describing it visually, audibly and texturally. It was an instinctive process for me - both the drawings, and the voiced words - which were not scripted and just came while I was sat in my car, as I often do. Stalled and unable to initiate the next activity. New to making, I am moved almost to tears that with these kinds of opportunities and invitations space opens up - to consider that it might be possible to live and work in a manner that honours the natural rhythm of my neurology.”

Commissioned and supported by Coventry 2021 and Unlimited, celebrating the work of disabled artists, with funding from Arts Council England.

This work is one of five micro-works programmed as part of Southbank Centre’s Unlimited Festival, January 2021.