DYSPLA §1NDA - a neurodivergent aesthetic ALISON LAM

A digital art exhibition by award-winning neurodivergent-led organisation DYSPLA.

Artist: Alison Lam

Type: Workshop/Talk

Date: Thursday 16th April

Time (11:30-12:30)

This session centres the moments often overlooked in neurodivergent communication - silence, hesitation, gesture, withdrawal, masking. The things that are present but not recognised. Working from my perspective as a British-born Chinese neurodivergent artist, I explore how these behaviours are shaped and misread through cultural expectation: the inherited ways of moving, speaking, and withholding that come from growing up between British and Chinese worlds. What is seen as “too much,” “too quiet,” or “not quite right” is often communication that hasn’t been understood (and sometimes cannot be without shifting the framework in which it’s interpreted)

The session focuses on the space just before overwhelm: the moment when something is felt but not yet spoken, the gap between being yourself and being legible to others.

Participants are invited to write or draw a moment of not fitting in, masking, or becoming overwhelmed then physically discard it - a safe, contained act that allows the group to also realise what is lost when communication goes unrecognised. A second response is folded into an origami lotus, partially visible and partially concealed. This transformation shows what is hidden or unsaid, while revealing the collective action communication - how meaning can enter a shared space, be witnessed and reshaped together.

This workshop treats gesture, material and action as language. It asks what happens when that language is finally noticed, held and shared.

Through drawing and folding, participants work at the edge of what can be said—where meaning slips, fragments or is only partially revealed, and where shared attention makes the invisible visible.

Artist Bio:

Alison Lam is a British-Chinese neurodivergent social practice artist. Mother of neurodivergent sons. Her work investigates misrecognition, silence and cross-cultural communication through material processes and participatory practice. She works with gesture, trace and form as languages in themselves, challenging how neurodivergent experience is read, framed and understood within institutional and cultural contexts.

www.alisonlam.art

@alisonlam_art

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

University of Greenwich Galleries, 10 Stockwell Street, London, United Kingdom

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