Emotional Cartographies

Emotional Cartographies with Ciara O'Connor

Saturday, April 18th, 6-8pm UK via Zoom

Pricing:

We feel that these kinds of creative, reflective spaces should be available to everyone. For this reason we have decided to make these sessions completely financially accessible. Recommended ticket cost is £10, however, free and 'pay what you can' access is available. If you need free access, choose the Pay What You Can ticket and enter £0.

About the Session:

“Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from.”

• Rebecca Solnit

Do you ever feel like your creativity is a place you are trying to navigate without a map?

In Emotional Cartographies, a two hour workshop, artist and facilitator Ciara O’Connor Walsh invites participants into a creative exploration of the mind as a landscape. Together we will explore how map making can become a tool for understanding, anticipating and honouring the terrains of our inner worlds, helping us navigate our creative journeys through life.

Inspired by the writing of Rebecca Solnit, Emotional Cartographies treats our inner lives not as problems to solve but as landscapes to explore. They may contain caverns of doubt, glaciers of procrastination, hidden paths of wonder and unexpected rivers of attention.

In this neurodiversity affirming, low demand space, participants will experiment with map making as a way of understanding their creative lives. Instead of following the rules of conventional maps, we will develop our own forms of wayfinding. We will chart emotions, memories, sensory shifts and moments of curiosity as landmarks in a personal creative atlas.

Together we will explore practices such as:

• The Threshold. Beginning with Solnit’s question: How do we find what we do not yet know?

• Cognitive Counter Mapping. Charting Islands of Safety, Rivers of Attention and Fault Lines of Overwhelm

• Care-tographies. Creating maps that prioritise care, attention and the overlooked textures of daily creative life

This is a sensory friendly digital space where movement, stimming, quiet participation and nonlinear thinking are welcome. There is no pressure to produce finished work. We focus on noticing rather than performing and on the beauty of the unfinished.

No artistic experience is required. All you need is a notebook, a pen and a willingness to wander.

By the end of the session participants will leave with the beginnings of their own internal map of creativity, and a new way of understanding how their attention moves, where ideas emerge and how they find their way.

“Getting lost is another way of finding your way.”

About the Facilitator:

Ciara O’Connor Walsh is a neurodivergent multidisciplinary artist and systems thinker working at the intersection of ecology, poetic form, and embodied experience. With a background spanning theatre, audio storytelling, and creative facilitation, her practice is rooted in kinship-based, community-driven approaches to social and ecological change. Her work treats autistic perception as an aesthetic and ecological resource rather than a problem to be solved. Influenced by systems theory, permaculture, ecological imagination, and kinship-based worldviews, she creates participatory experiences that invite different ways of sensing place, time, and community. She is currently developing an Arts Council funded project that explores how living systems can mirror neurodiversity. Alongside her performance practice, Ciara is an award-winning audio producer and writer with a background in theatre, cabaret, and youth arts facilitation. Her work blends the personal and political, asking how we might build gentler systems and more spacious stories in a world that rushes toward the literal and certain. Her earlier life in cabaret still shows up in her current work, in its intimacy, excess, and refusal to separate laughter from sorrow. Her work invites people to slow down, follow their attention, and trust that other ways of sensing, thinking, and storytelling are not only possible, but essential to co-create and imagine into being a future for our selves and the planet.

Refund & Cancellation Policy:

No refunds or cancellations will be possible for this course. If you have questions or concerns about this, please contact kr@neuroqueercreative.com before booking.

We reserve the right to cancel the course if we do not meet a minimum number of registrants. In this instance, all tickets will be fully refunded, minus payment processing fees.