Just a few days before I had turned three years old, I had been diagnosed under the autistic spectrum, a diagnosis which would ultimately affect my life on a day-to-day basis. Growing up in the small sea-side town of Shoreham-by-Sea, I would begin to learn things about myself at a different pace to the other kids around me in school, grow attachments to the surroundings I had and start the process of making friends that I would have for life. This would have to be started all over again by moving to the Kent coast in the form of Folkestone, a location that I had no prior attachment to. This project aims to look at every aspect of my life up until today and the effect that my autism diagnosis had on it, ranging from the hyper fixations that would directly be linked to my diagnosis along with the surroundings I familiarised myself with when growing up. The use of shattered glass plastered with my photography demonstrates the fragility that comes with my diagnosis; the heightened emotions that can come out in destructive forms is something that I have dealt with before on a number of occasions, along with the separation of the images showing a glimpse of having to associate separate memories apart, even if they all fit together to represent growing up on the autistic spectrum.
Click here to view an especially made website for this project that shows the shattered glass pieces in a similar fashion to how they would have been displayed in my 2025 Free Range exhibiton.
