Aut Splash

Aut Splash is an autobiographical photo-poetry project about late-diagnosed autism, sensory overload, masking and autistic joy. Through blur, movement, colour and fragmentation, it makes embodied neurodivergent experience visible beyond explanation.

Aut Splash is an autobiographical photographic project exploring late-diagnosed autism through sensory overload, masking, movement and autistic joy. Developed between 2022 and 2025, the work brings together photography, poetry and self-publishing to investigate how an internal and embodied experience can become visible without being reduced to explanation.

The project emerged from my attempt to understand my own perception after receiving an autism diagnosis later in life. For many autistic people, the external image of everyday functioning can conceal an intense inner experience shaped by overstimulation, repetition, exhaustion and the continual effort to appear legible to others. I use photography to explore the distance between these two realities: the person who is seen and the sensory, emotional and physical experience that remains unseen.

The images are created through movement, blur, repetition, multiple exposure, colour and fragmentation. These elements are not intended to illustrate autism in a literal or universal way. Instead, they form a visual language that evokes instability, sensory intensity, disorientation and moments of pleasure. The photographs resist the expectation that an image should be clear, stable and immediately readable. They ask the viewer to stay with uncertainty and to encounter perception as something shifting, embodied and subjective.

Aut Splash is important to me as a form of neurodivergent self-representation. Autism is often described through medical, behavioural or external viewpoints. This project begins from lived experience and proposes a different way of seeing: not a documentary explanation of autism, but a sensory and poetic encounter with one autistic perspective. By combining images with text and the physical form of a self-published photobook, the work also considers how sequence, rhythm and materiality can communicate experiences that cannot be adequately expressed through a single photograph.

The project has developed into a limited-edition photobook and an exhibition format. It can be presented through a sequence of framed or pinned photographs, book displays, projections, poetry and, where appropriate, sound. I am also interested in developing the work further into a multisensory installation that explores the relationship between image, space, sound and the viewer’s body.

The project has been presented at the Folkestone Fringe Festival (2025) and at my solo show at the Stables Gallery at Folkestone (2026), and developed into a limited-edition self-published book.

Through the PhMuseum Women Photographers Grant, I would like to expand the project’s exhibition and photobook potential, develop a more ambitious installation, and connect the work with wider conversations around neurodivergent identity, visibility and contemporary photographic practice. The grant would provide an opportunity to bring Aut Splash into dialogue with curators and audiences beyond its autobiographical origins, while retaining the intimacy and complexity of the experience from which it began.