Art provides a portal by which to view and experience history. Light, shape, color, and style coalesce to illuminate diverse narratives. Powerful art even bridges audience and artist by evoking personal memory and emotion. Connecting artist and audience biography with history pervade the process of creating and viewing art. To explore how art might create and convey sociology, I hope to create a body of artwork representing my time providing behavioral therapy to two children with autism. Highly influenced by socio-political shifts and research (Wolff, 2004), autism diagnosis and treatment developed rapidly over the past two decades. My artistic project will connect this shifting history to my own personal experience in the field. I plan to punctuate the work with artistically conveyed emotional experience to highlight the power of emotion in biography. So frequently the discipline abstracts the thought process and emotion of research participants, thus separating itself from personal narrative. I hope to defy this practice by focusing on my own lived experience through artistic journaling supplemented by historical facts. Through this project, I hope to find if sociology can defy the confines of words on paper and expand into other forms.
References:
Wolff, S. (2004). The history of autism. European child & adolescent psychiatry, 13(4), 201-208.