Neurodivergent Artists Re-reading the Archive

David Parker, Figment Arts: Introduction

When I heard about 'Different Voices, Different Stories', it got me thinking about our organisation, Figment Arts, and the wider disability arts movement.

For decades, disability arts organisations have challenged limiting ideas about disabled people and created space for people to represent themselves, in their own voices. They have shown that disabled people are not simply subjects of care, policy or medical history, but artists, performers, thinkers and cultural leaders.

Mind the Gap in Bradford, and Heart n Soul in London are two examples of disability arts organisations with connections to place and heritage.

Both organisations have helped create opportunities for learning-disabled artists to make ambitious work, build creative communities and shape culture on their own terms.

Mind the Gap, Bradford

In 2008, Mind the Gap opened its studios in Lister Mills, Manningham, marked by the Moth Ball event, celebrating the building’s history as a former silk warehouse.

The opening of the studios formed part of a major £2.4 million capital project, delivered with Bradford Council and supported by investment from Arts Council England, ERDF and other funders.

Lister Mills appears in the Historic England Archive, including views of the Silk Mill where Mind The Gap studios now operates, yet the organisation and its work is not referenced.

Heart n Soul, London

Heart n Soul grew out of people working together and trying out new ways of making art. It offers another important story, rooted in collaboration, experimentation and community.

In 1984, musician Mark Williams, now Heart n Soul’s Artistic Director and Chief Executive, began running creative sessions with a group of people with learning disabilities, including Pino Frumiento, who attended the local day service, The Mulberry Centre.

After the group moved to The Albany, in Deptford, they renamed themselves Heart n Soul. With theatre practitioner Alix Parker joining them, they began creating original shows, stories and music together. The group, later known as the Original Company, made an album, toured shows at disability rights festivals in the UK and Europe, and began attracting wider attention within both the arts and disability worlds.

These rich stories, with strong connections to place could enhance the archive record, highlighting the changing use of the built environment. They are not only sites of the past. They are also sites of access, cultural leadership, creativity and change.

The challenge of the Archive

Mind the Gap and Heart n Soul are places where learning-disabled artists built creative communities and changed public understanding of disability. 

Buildings may be catalogued for their architectural, civic or cultural significance, yet that only tells part of the story. It does not automatically capture what disabled artists made possible there. 

These examples matter because they show that disability culture is not marginal. It is vibrant, inventive and deeply connected to place.

Learning-disabled, autistic and neurodivergent people are not absent from heritage. They have actively shaped the cultural life of towns, cities and communities across England.

When we turn to archival records, a different pattern often emerges.

What archival records reveal, and what questions they raise

Learning-disabled, autistic and neurodivergent people do appear in the Historic England Archive, but very often in relation to hospitals, asylums and other institutions.

The language of those records is often highly problematic. It reflects the attitudes and assumptions of its time: medicalised, deficit-focused and shaped by systems of diagnosis, segregation and control.

For a disability-led organisation like Figment Arts, this creates an immediate tension.

The medicalised framing found in many historic records conflicts with the social model of disability that informs our work. It also conflicts with the values of self-representation that have been so important in disability arts.

This does not mean such records should be ignored or erased. They remain part of the historical record.

But they do need to be read critically and placed in context. Historic language can tell us a great deal about how people were viewed and treated, but it should not be allowed to speak unchallenged.

Just as important is the question of absence.

If disabled people most often appear in archives through institutions, what is missing?

Where are the stories of everyday life, care, friendship, work, creativity, performance, leisure and community? Where are the stories of disabled people acting as artists, neighbours, makers and leaders?

These are some of the questions at the heart of this project.

Artists as researchers: Exploring the Historic England Archive

Figment Arts collaborated with Gemma Williams, Yvonne J Foster and Kathy Williams, three artist/researchers who also identify as autistic/neurodivergent to explore the Historic England Archive.

The artists mapped journeys through places that mattered to them.

These starting points mattered because they shifted the emphasis away from disability as something defined only by institutions, and towards disability as lived experience in the everyday world.

They looked at records, images, descriptions and places, tracing what felt familiar, what felt absent and what felt uncomfortable. Some records sparked recognition. Others highlighted the distance between official language and lived reality.

The process was not just about finding entries. It was about asking what kinds of stories those entries made visible, and what they left out.

Each of the three artists then developed an individual response to their exploration. These responses are not simply illustrations of archival material. They are creative acts of interpretation.

They map journeys through the archive while also questioning it. They draw attention to the emotional and political charge of language. They highlight absences as well as presences.

They remind us that heritage is not neutral. It is shaped by decisions about what gets catalogued, how it is described and whose perspective is centred.

Artist response: 'Imagining What Isn't There' by Gemma Williams

We know that archives are never neutral – they’re always shaped by the social constructions of the time and the interpretations of the archivists. At the same time, the conceptualisation and public adoption of neurodivergence as a way of understanding certain people’s lived experiences is relatively recent, and I was keen to see what relevant stories or discourses might exist in the Historic England archive – even if in a quieter way, or through their absence.

After struggling to identify material that felt connected to neurodivergent lives, I began to experiment with creating my own ‘imagined’ archive entries.

Inspired by approaches to queering archives, I thought about this as a process of neuroqueering the archive.

Identifying physical locations tied to neurodivergent histories wasn’t straightforward. Much neurodivergent culture and activism emerged online, forming communities that are not always rooted in place. So I created an imagined entry for Autscape, an autistic-led conference that has taken place across the UK for over twenty years.

Seeing these spaces presented as if they were real archive entries was unexpectedly moving. By documenting something we say: this is worth noting; this is important; these are lives worth knowing. It helped me feel like I belonged, and that the histories in the archive also belonged to me.

Artist response: 'A Previous Life' by Yvonne J Foster

I collect objects with a previous life, old things that once belonged to other people. It started with a tin box of cowry shells, given to me by my father’s best friend, who owned an antique shop. I would sit and sort them, arranging and rearranging the ones I loved most. There was comfort in old things. Something to hold, and something to call my own.

Each of the images that follow comes from the Historic England archive, placed alongside my own work, not as influence or source, but as echo.

Cardboard boxes

Cardboard boxes are sensory things, tactile, textured, bound up in childhood. My father worked in a warehouse that ran alongside the house I grew up in. It was both organised and cluttered, boxes stacked on boxes stacked on boxes, disappearing upward into the dark.

When I was young I wasn’t allowed inside without him. It was too dangerous, he said. Years later, when he finally cleared it out, I understood why. The floor slope, the building had once been a slaughterhouse, designed to drain blood down toward the river next door. He’d built the shelves himself, wedging things underneath to keep them level. They never were. A hilarious, cobbled-together 70s mess that I loved completely.

When he needed to keep me still and quiet, he would lift me up and lower me into an enormous cardboard box, and hand me marker pens. I have that memory whole: drawing on the inside walls, making my own world within a world. I could be there for hours.

I’ve made a miniature version of that scene since. His world, rebuilt from tiny boxes.

Wooden boxes and drawers

I love numbers and labels and cataloguing. I have wooden boxes with brass numbered plaques, filled with smaller boxes, each one telling a story. Boxes filled with tiny bottles, and inside the bottles, tinier things, all of them connected to memories. And then the empty ones: wooden boxes bought in advance, waiting. Hundreds of small glass bottles not yet filled, not yet organised. The next part of the project, held in readiness.

I have drawers too, empty ones, previously used in unknown places, still with their numbered labels. Numbers that once meant something precise and important to someone, somewhere. Now just a number for an unknown thing, waiting for me to bring it back to life.

The Historic England archive has a photographic record of industrial remnants, drawers, boxes, labels, numbers, lists, physical objects that have quietly left our everyday lives. 

I don’t have a shed or a workshop, so my versions are just that little bit smaller. And it isn’t only the empty boxes and drawers I’m filling. I’m recreating the cataloguing system itself. Old index cards, archival books, handwriting, typewriters.

Using all the old things to bring back what’s been lost.

Numbers on the wall

On a whitewashed wall behind the stable house at Audley End, there is a hidden list of numbers. Scratched calculations, a tally, most likely: birds caught or animals hung on the wooden hooks that still line the wall below.

The marks were left by someone who worked there. Educated enough to add neatly, but scribbling on whatever surface was to hand, the wall itself becoming the page. There is something deeply pleasing about that. 

Not the grand record, not the estate accounts kept in careful ledgers, but this: a working person’s trace, hiding in plain sight on a whitewashed wall. That kind of evidence is a quiet joy to find. Proof that someone stood exactly here, doing the ordinary arithmetic of their days.

Deep scratches on the brick wall

On the corner of a closed Victorian school, deep scratches are carved into the red brick wall. The school sits behind a church, on the same street as my childhood home, council owned, shut before I was born, never opened again. An abandoned building I walked past every day without really seeing.

The marks are next to where the boys’ and girls’ entrances would have been. Children lining up, day after day, long enough and restless enough to leave themselves behind in the brick.

I’ve researched the social history of the local parish and found one of them, a young girl who attended the school, became a pupil teacher, and eventually qualified as a teacher in her own right. A whole life, quietly unfolding on a street I know by heart.

I love imagining the stories behind objects and places. The traces people leave without meaning to. The ones who pressed their hands against the same wall I pressed mine against, without either of us knowing.

The handwritten book

A.N. Leech’s St Marylebone Grammar School reading diary opens to a handwritten list beginning in 1910 with 'Around the World in Eighty Days'. It continues, year by year, until 1965, where the handwriting has grown scratchy and deteriorated. Fifty-five years of meticulous dates and titles. A personal library built from memory and ink.

The back pages become a different kind of record: plays attended, talkies seen, all numbered and dated. A list-maker. A chronicler. Someone for whom the experience was never quite enough on its own, it had to be written down, accounted for and kept. I recognise that impulse. I think it’s part of a neurodivergent way of being in the world, and it’s part of what draws me so completely to archives.

Not content with the book speaking for itself. I was drawn to finding out more: the person behind the list.

On Ancestry, I found Arthur Norman Leech. He married at twenty-seven and moved with his wife from London to Kent. His occupation was railway clerk. The last book he read was 'Land of the Black Buffalo'. Then the list simply stops.

Artist response: 'Navigating Access and Visibility' by Kathy Williams

My journey through the Historic England Archive was to search for traces of where autism, neurodiversity and art might meet within the records.

Exploring search terms

I began, as many do, with the search bar. Some terms opened doors; others led almost nowhere. “Art” returned an overwhelming 14,743 results, while “artist” (1,854) and “artists” (943) suggested a rich and densely populated field. Yet when I tried to bring neurodiversity into that same space, the landscape shifted dramatically. “Neurodiverse” returned nothing at all. “Autism” surfaced just two entries. “Downs Syndrome” brought none.

Other terms hinted at different patterns. “Neurology” produced 79 results, “depression” 63. Words like “disabled” (426), “disability” (115), and “learning disabled” (26) were present, but often framed in ways that felt clinical or distancing.
 
Taken together, these results revealed not just gaps in content, but gaps in language, a lack of connection between identity and creativity, between lived experience and artistic contribution.

Language, accessibility and place

Language, too, played a significant role in accessibility. Much of the terminology used within the archive felt academic, dense and, at times, exclusionary, particularly for people with dyslexia or attention differences.

In some cases, historic language appeared without context or warning, which could be difficult or upsetting to encounter.

My search eventually became more personal.

I turned my attention to a place I knew well, my former studio, the Riboleau site in Ryde, a space with layers of recently uncovered history, including connections to a sailor who served with Nelson and a relative of Jacqueline du Pré.

Once an art school, now a growing community hub, it seemed exactly the kind of place where art and lived experience might meet.

Searching for Riboleau

Across two centuries, the St John’s site evolved from a naval officer’s private estate into a place shaped by art, care, spirituality and community.

Searching for “Riboleau Day Centre,” “Riboleau Community Studios and Gardens,” and even “Riboleau Street” returned nothing.

Only by stepping back and searching more broadly for Ryde did results begin to appear and even then, Riboleau itself remained absent.

This absence pointed to something larger: the limitations of what is included, and how.

While the Historic England Archive did not hold this story, I was able to find it elsewhere, through other forms of documentation.

It raised the question of how partner sites, local knowledge, and community histories might be better connected, how these “missing pieces” could be gathered and shared.

A space where people can find themselves 

What my journey ultimately reveals is potential.

With clearer navigation, more visible entry points, accessible guidance (including video and Easy Read formats), and stronger links between archival material and current community work, the archive could become something more open and dynamic.

Not just a place to search the past, but a space where people can find themselves within it and contribute to what it becomes next.

Towards Different Voices and Different Stories

Heritage is not only about what has been preserved in formal records, but also about the living relationships between people, places and creative practice.

By bringing artist-researchers into conversation with the Historic England Archive, this project begins to bridge a gap between official records and lived experience.

It opens up space for new readings, new questions and new forms of visibility. It also suggests that archives can grow richer when they are revisited through contemporary, disability-led perspectives.

Too often, disabled people appear in heritage records as subjects to be described by others. In this project, neurodivergent and autistic artists become the interpreters and storytellers.

Their responses do not offer a single answer. Instead, they invite us to look again: at the archive, at the language it contains, at the places it records, and at the many stories that have yet to be fully seen.