Neurodiverse Artists.
Debbie Todd
Nadia Thompson
Claire White
12/02/24 - 10/03/24
Debbie Todd
After completing her MA at North School of Art in 2023 Debbie has thrived in her professional practice. Focusing her photography on socially engaged projects, she shoots campaigns around marginalised communities. One of her campaigns was a UK-wide campaign for the Child Organ Donation Campaign in association with Red Sky Foundation and FUJIFILM.
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The work on display is a selection from the series - The Meaning of Being Different.
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"All of my work is centred around people and how our different lifestyles, thoughts and feelings provoke reactions in other people. I like to take portraits that tell a story about the sitter, whether it be documentary, fashion or fine art is irrelevant. My most recent body of work examines the physical, medical, neuro-diverse and lifestyle differences of people in the UK. It looks at how these people are viewed and why preconceptions are made about them as a person using proverbs and idioms that have been used regularly without much thought on how it makes them feel. The work has been created to initiate conversations about language and promote the use of more people with differences in the photographic industry."
- Debbie Todd.
Nadia Thompson
Nadia Thompson (nee Zedan) is a contemporary artist whose art is expressive and often abstract in nature. Self-taught, she prefers to create instinctively; drawing inspiration from her thoughts and feelings as she paints. Music and movement often take centre stage in her practice as she layers a variety of mixed media into her paintings. Meaning is at the core of everything she creates and her pieces often speak to injustices and hardship within the world.
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Nadia has a BEng in Computer Science from York (focus: Human-Computer Interaction), and post-COVID spent 2 years on an education charity board. Following over a decade in the corporate world as a regulatory reform project manager Nadia found art later in life, and set up her own in-house studio in 2022. She spent a year undertaking hand sculpting tutelage with Esther Nelson, bringing 3D structure to her work. Her environmentally-themed piece, In Nature’s Way, was selected as a finalist in Explorer’s Against Extinction Sketch for Survival 2023 and her series on post-partum body positivity was recently featured in T’Art Magazine.
Claire White
Claire is a textile artist and loves producing work that is both decorative and traditional in its look but with a subversive social twist. Claire is a disabled artist and this informs their themes and practice. Recently much of Claire’s work has been around body shame. Using body prints or drawings from self portraits to create the backbone of paintings before sewing into them giving them text and statements for discussion. Claire loves to explore socially engaged themes that affect the wider community. Ableism, Disability, Addiction, Shame, Trauma, Narcissistic Abuse and how society interacts with all these, judges and views, the lives of those affected.
