Episode 1 - Artist Elinor Rowlands
Elinor Rowlands is an Autistic/ADHD multi-disciplinary artist and is a Fine Art practice-based PhD candidate within the Artistic Research Centre (ARC) at NTU on a bursary scholarship.
Her work is founded on the contemporary interplay between sound art, experimental forms of composition, language derived from the neurodivergent lived experience and live art, underpinned by political interest and the act of “noticing”. Her academic research explores how autistic stimming is an artistic methodology.
Biodivergent Sites and Sounds shines light on the importance of preserving our waterways and landscapes via autistic female led activities. Elinor's paintings are responses to the local stories and sounds found around London's waterways.
With creative technologist, Charles Matthews, they have digitalised part of London’s waterways into an online interactive site mapping soundscapes of Harlesden's Canalside.
These digital traces reveal autoethnographic connections to place, community, biodiversity, polluted waters, and the natural world. They culminate in Elinor’s exhibition at Creative Health Camden, which featured paintings inspired by the highly sensory soundscapes she created in collaboration with other autistic musicians and pupils from Harlesden Primary School.
Together, they harnessed ‘autistic stimming’ as both a creative and epistemological tool—reframing it not as a symptom, but as a language of relation, perception, power, self-expression, and creativity.
These digital trails illustrate autoethnographic links with place, community, biodiversity and the natural world, culminating in Elinor's exhibition at Creative Health Camden featuring paintings that illustrate the scenographical sensory soundscapes that she has made in collaboration with other autistic musicians and pupils from Harlesden primary school to examine ‘autistic stimming’ as an act of power, self-expression and creativity.