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

Counter Mapping with Art explores the potential of sketchbooks for neurodivergent creative practice. Instead of treating sketchbooks as a place for finished aesthetic ideas, I wanted to approach it as an authentic tool for process and exploration.

Through a messy, deeply personal process, my work challenges 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 is made up of a sketchbook, film, and an essay. The sketchbook is 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.