Maddy Attwood 

Text/Video/Installation   

Instagram: @maddyattwood

It’s about autism.
 
More specifically—autism, empathy and communication.  My work communicates through writing, whether in installation, video, documents—it’s interdisciplinary, so I can better encapsulate the full lived-experience-spectrum of autism.

Maddy Attwood’s FLYSTRIKE is an assertion of the nature of autistic existence and its validity.  A “flystrike” is when flies lay their eggs inside another living creature.  Upon hatching into maggots, they eat their way out of the host.  It’s a visceral thing, and it speaks to a core facet of Autistic Existence explored in my work—that we live in a world where to be an autistic person as an entity is innately Wrong.  So, as an autistic person, you’ve got to figure out how to be something else, and many something elses.  The answer is, of course, to just be yourself, but also not Yourself As Autistic—so the answer is to be neurotypical.  And that’ll bury inside you, and eat its way out until all of You is gone.  Through my work, I’m reasserting the You.