NeuroEcologies

NeuroEcologies with Ciara O'Connor

Thursdays, Oct 1st - 22nd & Wednesday, Oct 28th, 7-8:30pm UK via Zoom

Book as individual sessions or the full series.

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 for one session is £10.

Recommended ticket cost for the whole series is £45.

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.

If you are able to pay more than the suggested price to help offset costs of free places, you can also choose the PWYC option.

About the Course:

NeuroEcologies is a five-week creative course for neurodivergent and neuroqueer creatives exploring creative practice through ecological “biomes”: lichen, tree, bog, river and bird. Each session uses writing/mark making/sketching, sensory noticing, and object work to ask what nature can teach us about attention, masking, slowness, transition, belonging and our creative lives. Rather than approaching creativity as productivity, the course invites participants to think of their practice as an ecology: seasonal, relational, sensory, adaptive and alive. Across the five weeks, we will explore lichen as close attention and edge-dwelling, trees as memory and rootedness, bog as rest and preservation, river as threshold, and birds as orientation, instinct and movement between worlds. The space will be access-aware, low-pressure and creatively flexible, with no forced sharing and multiple ways to engage through words, images, objects, silence, movement or reflection.

*The course will also support the research and development of a solo performance work, The Flight Between Worlds, but participants will not be asked to provide personal material for the show.

Course Structure:

1. Conversations with Lichen: Thursday, Oct 1st

   1. Exploring detail, slowness, symbiosis, edge-dwelling and overlooked intelligence. Prompts might include: What do you notice that others miss? What part of your creative practice lives at the edge? How are we queering ourselves like lichen do? Create a poetic museum label for something small and overlooked.

2. Everybody Has a Favourite Tree: Thursday, Oct 8th

   1. Exploring memory, rootedness, place, childhood, safety and being witnessed by the more-than-human world. Prompts might include: Recall a tree or outdoor place that mattered to you. What did it know about you? What would it say to your nervous system now? We might write a poem or sketch this tree as a part of our creative lineage.

3. Bog: Refusal to Perform: Thursday, Oct 15th

   1. Exploring slowness, burnout, hidden work, preservation, rest and not needing to be visible to be real. Prompts might include: What part of you has gone underground but is not dead? What do you want preserved, not fixed?

4. River / Threshold: Moving Between Worlds: Thursday, Oct 22nd

   1. Exploring transitions, code-switching, masking, movement between selves and the difficulty of crossings. Prompts might include: What worlds do you move between? What version of you appears in each one?

5. Bird / Flight: Orientation and Tribe: Wednesday, Oct 28th

   1. Exploring flight as fear response, migration, instinct, flocking, perspective and finding another way through. Prompts might include: What is your internal compass? Who or what is your flock? Create a flight map with safe landing places, no-fly zones, warning signals and magnetic north.

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.