Counter Mapping with Art: Sketchbooks as Living, Learning and Feeling Spaces

Counter Mapping with Art explores the sketchbook as a space for alternative ways of knowing, with a particular focus on neurodivergent experience and creative practice. Rather than treating the sketchbook as a place for finished beautiful or aesthetic ideas, I approach it as a living active site of feeling, learning, thinking and resistance.

Through a messy, deeply personal process, the work challenges dominant ideas about how knowledge is produced, valued, and archived. Drawing on Michel de Certeau's concept of tactics, I countermap through my sketchbook by disrupting normative educational structures, colonial aesthetic hierarchies, and institutional expectations of order, productivity, and emotional regulation.

The project comprises a sketchbook, a film, and an essay. At its core is the sketchbook itself: the primary artwork and the place where thinking happens through making. The film documents the project's development and provides context for the sketchbook, while the essay reflects on the theoretical framework underpinning the work.