EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Series 2, Ep18: Neuroqueering Love, with Laurie Green
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EPISODE NOTES
This week on the Unmasking Unschool Podcast,
I invite previous podcast guest Laurie Green back onto the podcast, this time to talk about the culmination of what was once a vague dream, now realised as a tangible reality in the form of a BOOK.
The BOOK: Deliquescent Beings: A Neuroqueering Book of Love
https://www.neuroqueering.network/product/deliquescentbeings/
Neuroqueering Love: A Gathering:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/neuroqueering-love-a-gathering-tickets-1042904935737
Laurie's instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/neuroqueeringhumans/
Artists in the book:
Artists for the gathering on 1st November:
সঙ্ঘমিত্রা sanghamitra @the.poison.faeline
Hannah Mae Buckingham @natureb.y
Florin Garzotto @florin_garzotto
Rrangwane @semausu.sa.pulayakgojana
TRANSCRIPT:
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[00:00:00] Hey, sibling, you are listening to the unmasking unschooled podcast. This is for visionaries, creatives, and change makers who happen to be autistic, who are done with pathology paradigms, the masks and misinterpretations of the past and the burnout cycles that come from trying to fit in with what doesn't work.
[00:00:31] You are here to create new aligned life structures, to innovate industries, to design liberatory solutions, and create new culture by becoming yourself. My name is Louisa Shaeri. I'm an artist, coach, and founder of SOLA Systems. This is all about you getting unstuck, reinventing and elevating your sense of self.
[00:00:51] Self, having the social context and frameworks to make a life that makes sense for how you make sense so you can finally experience who you're here to be in your fullness. Let's deep dive into it.
[00:01:10] Welcome to a very special episode where I'm welcoming someone who's been on the podcast before, back to talk about what's been happening the last couple of years and something very exciting that they are, uh, doing in the world this week. And so I want to welcome. back, Laurie Green. Welcome Laurie. Thanks Louisa.
[00:01:30] And thank you very much for having me back. It's a pleasure to be here. It's been two and a half years since episode nine came out in February 2022. And there's been so much going on for you in that time. So much you created. So much of yourself that you've become and so much of your, your practice as an artist and your work, uh, the impact of that has been growing and we're going to talk about it.
[00:01:56] We're also going to talk about the upcoming launch of your book, an anthology of texts, visual works around the theme of love from the perspective of 11 artists who are intentionally framing their work as neuroqueering practices. Catch us up. What's been going on for you the last couple of years? We've been working together for quite some time now and I know that something that I've offered to you is the timeline of a three year goal.
[00:02:29] And this is something that I like to offer as a time frame in which to dream up some big project and then have that inform. Okay, what am I doing about it in the next three months? And so the purpose of setting a goal like that. And, and identifying some kind of desired result is less about the result itself and more about who you become as you're doing that, as you're creating it, and creating a relationship to doing, to actions, and to moving towards things that we're desiring to create on purpose, and moving through all of the stuff that comes up as part of that, right?
[00:03:11] And including, you know, how do we execute on a dream? When how we do things. is necessarily different. It needs a different approach, a degree of self trust to go against some of the given paths and to do it in the way that we want. And so this book that we're going to talk about is a three year goal coming to completion and you being in the crescendo moment of all the excitement and the realization of that and holding something physical that for so long has been a dream, has been an idea.
[00:03:47] And in something that you've been creating out of out of nothing. So I'd love you to share a bit about what's been the process of having a goal and or having a dream and moving towards it. What's that been like for you? Thank you for the question. Um, I think. The first thing that comes to mind is the bit before I was even aware that it was a dream.
[00:04:15] There was kind of a large portion of my life where I wanted to do things, I wanted to make things, I wanted to create things, and I loved books, and I loved making things in general. But, for some reason, None of these things ever resolved themselves into something that I could identify as a dream. I wouldn't give myself permission even to have the dream in the first place.
[00:04:42] And we started working together four years ago when I joined the, what was at the time I think called SOLA Siblings, and I think That space and the coaching that you have offered, it gave me the permission to dream in the first place, to, to even allow these kind of disparate desires and interests and wants to form into something not concrete because dreams are obviously not concrete at all, but something that was identifiable as a, a thing that I could work towards or a thing that I could one day hold in my hands.
[00:05:21] And, allowing myself to have those big dreams was a, was a huge first step for me. And from that point, I think it's felt incredibly natural to work towards Something that is meaningful to me and hopefully, and I believe it is, meaningful to other people as well. I think it was maybe two and a half years ago that the book, as a specific dream, came to, and then as a goal, came to, came to me and, like, I expressed that and admitted that to other people.
[00:05:59] I confessed it, if you like. At the time it was vague, you know, it was, it was a dream still. And my, my internal experience of dreams and of imagination is very abstract. I don't have a visual internal experience. I don't have an internal sensory experience that is specific in any way. So I don't, I don't see, I didn't see the book, I didn't have a vision of what the book was, I didn't know what the book was, I knew I wanted to make a book, and I knew I wanted it to be something that I loved, and that other people loved, and over the course of the two and a half years since, the book has It's become more real slowly to begin with, like very slowly, and then in recent months very quickly, it's become real in a, in a very sudden way.
[00:06:51] And this, the crescendo is a good metaphor for it because it really feels like there's a momentum that builds. And this kind of abstract imaginary thing that doesn't exist, didn't exist three years ago, as time passes, it slowly resolves into something very specific and very real and very material.
[00:07:12] There's a convergence between these kind of timelines of book existing and book not existing. And every little step, every little action along the way brings It has brought that material reality where the book does exist closer to the reality that I'm moving through. And now I have it in my hands. It's like a thing.
[00:07:37] It exists and people are going to be able to read it. It's been quite a, quite a journey and quite a, an amazing experience to practice that theory. Which, you know, like, I, I, I kind of, I trusted, I had to trust you at the beginning, it was a theory, I, I like, it sounded good, I had an inkling and an intuition that what you were saying about this process was true, and, and that's me trusting my, my instinct, my, my body, the messages that it was telling me about this being a a way for me to, to do things that I wanted it to do in the world.
[00:08:13] And it's been proven absolutely correct. And yeah, I'm really happy for it to have happened like that. And the book is absolutely exquisite in its design, in the different works and texts that are included and just the intention and the generosity that you experience when, when reading it. I've been privy to the PDF before print.
[00:08:38] I cannot wait to hold one in my hand. But yeah, that process of you not knowing how, moving yourself through something you've never done before. You had no map, no way of knowing what the steps were and exactly what you were moving towards. And my role is really just to hold belief. It's very easy for me to see what's possible for you and believe ahead of it happening.
[00:09:04] And then that's something that you then build as you're taking steps, as you're building that clarity. And you've done so much work as well, especially in the beginning to fill some of those gaps for yourself by reaching out to people whose work you respected, designers, publishers. independent bookshops, ask the questions, and just that process in of itself can be very intimidating, let alone to decide that you too can, can do that, right?
[00:09:31] That you can just decide to create a book and then go and do it. Should we talk about the book? Do you want to introduce it and tell everyone? Yeah, absolutely. So it's called Deliquescent Beings, a neuro queering book of love, and it features the work of 11 artists. who make beautiful work from a neuroqueering perspective.
[00:09:54] There's a mixture of text and image. It's full of love, evocative of love. It's resonant of love. Um, the work is made with love and I think personally it's very beautiful. It's nice to touch. It's got a really nice texture. The cover is a really silky texture. It leaves a little bit of a fingerprint so you can, you can tell that it's been, it's been touched and interacted with.
[00:10:22] Yeah, I'm, I'm hugely appreciative of the work that the artists have put into it. They all took to the fairly vague brief. They understood what I was trying to do, and it's come together, I think, to be like a really nice piece of collaborative, co creative work. I think people will enjoy reading it as well.
[00:10:43] It's full of different kinds of love. It's not a didactic text. It's not trying to define and categorize love. It's joy. There's devotion, friendship. So it's published by Neuroqueering Humans, which is another project of yours that you've been working on the last couple of years. Meeting point or a convergence of, of what you've called multidisciplinary, multidimensional, uh, vessel for the generation of synchronicities.
[00:11:13] Tell us what, what do you mean? What is that? I guess that's a pretentious poetic way of describing it. So neuroqueering to me has been a really significant concept in my self understanding and positioning of self within the world. It's a concept that I originally came across in the work of Remi Yergeau and Nick Walker who have written about the idea extensively.
[00:11:39] For me, Neuroqueering is about freeing oneself and others. others around you from the normative expectations placed upon bodies and particularly from a perspective of neurodivergence and queerness. So it's a practice to me more than an identity. Neuroqueering is what I think of it as rather than neuroqueer and it's about intentionally making space for different realities.
[00:12:12] That exist within different people, but not. Making them into silos where they're separated off by their difference, but where the difference is part of the unification and part of the part of what brings people together. It's, uh, the difference being the beauty and, The difference being a point of connection rather than a point of differentiation.
[00:12:37] Neuroqueering Humans has been a, an attempt to create a space, create a network of people who share some of these same ideas. And, and this is the thing that the ideas don't need to be the same. They don't need to overlap entirely. People can come in and out of the concept. It's not rigid. The whole Deliquescent is Becoming liquid, becoming fluid, and the fluidity is really important to me as, as an aspect of neuroqueering.
[00:13:07] So neuroqueering humans, the first thing we did was offer some, some grants for, for artists engaged in neuroqueering practices. And these were fairly open ended grants where people used the money, however they saw fit to do whatever it was that they were interested in with relation to neuroqueering. At the end of that period, that was maybe two years ago now, I had all these connections and interactions with artists who saw something in Neuroqueering that resonated with them.
[00:13:38] And I was familiar with a lot of the work that they made because I'm very curious about what people make and I spend a lot of time looking at what people do and taking it in and I'm interested in the people as well as the art that they make. Um, It just, it just felt to me that love, as a kind of guiding principle of relation, that is a kind of inherently neuroqueering way of looking at things.
[00:14:09] I felt like this could be an opportunity to make something that, That conveyed the importance of love to me and the importance of love as a, as a, as a way of being, I suppose. And also to make it clear that love is not a single thing. It's not practice that I'm suggesting people follow. Specifically, it's, uh, something that people interpret for their own selves.
[00:14:37] There is a, there's something, there's something about love that, that people, Just get when you say it. It's, it's a powerful force. I think James Baldwin's work in particular, but also bell hooks. These are inspirations for me in how love is a unifying force in the universe. And That's what the book's about.
[00:14:59] And that's kind of what Neuroqueering Humans has been about ultimately as well. Although I didn't know it was going to be when I started it. And that multiplicity is really clear from the different entries, the works in the book. Do you want to talk a little bit about who's in the book, whose work is in the book?
[00:15:16] The cover image is a beautiful design created by Axe Raulet, who makes creature collages, and it's a representation of this neuroqueering, deliquescent being, kind of bizarre and beautiful and fluid and creature like all at once. Georgia Holman has written a beautiful piece which touches on death, and heartbreak and grieving and love that goes on beyond death and the eternal nature of love.
[00:15:54] And there's a beautiful playlist that goes with that too. Jess and Lua who work together, Jess Moraine and Lua Bairstow that is, they work together as a performing duo called Theatre With Legs and they've provided a conversation between the two of them, which is really touches on their specific relational form of love.
[00:16:16] I enjoyed the glimpse into their relationships that we get through that piece. Rebecca Jago and Ila provided a piece of writing with images, with photographic images. Which is, again, full of the kind of depths of love, and sometimes the discomfort of love, and the intensity of love, and breaking up, and staying together, and it's a very poetically moving piece of work.
[00:16:52] Rrangwane has made a series of multimedia collages. which are colourful and energetic and they touch on themes of indigenous tradition and love and Rambwana's upbringing in Botswana and concepts of Uhuru and other indigenous forms of knowledge and wisdom that sit outside of. colonial impositions and colonial notions of love.
[00:17:29] Sam Metz has made a series of line drawings, diagrams, that represent, in some way, experiences of love and the nature of love, and love as a connecting force. at different scales and they're dotted throughout the book. V. Westerman has made a, another multimedia collage which is a beautiful investigation into the erotic and Eros.
[00:18:02] Um, it's dark and moody and beautiful. Sef is the designer of the book and I, a special thank you to Sef for bringing it all together in a way that really works. It works as a piece. The different pieces are, there's differences between them, and I was uncertain how they would mesh together. But I think they come together really well, and that's largely down to Sef's work.
[00:18:33] And then I've got a few small pieces of music. poetry in there as well. The typesetting and the design is a work in itself. And then you've got your own words interspersed throughout that have a connective tissue effect, but also pull out some of the themes and address the reader directly as well. So yes, the book, Deliquescent Beings, A Neuroqueering Book of Love, release date is November the 1st.
[00:18:59] We'll put a link to the book. in the show notes, both to where you can buy the book and also to each of the artists and the designers involved. I'd love to talk about your practice a bit more, Laurie, because something that has really emerged in the last couple of years is how much creating those connections has been such a part of your work.
[00:19:20] But also, you know, I talk about connection is how making self connection your only goal and. When it comes to art making, that experience of self connection and what emerges out of that and what needs to be expressed also needs co conspirators, it needs collaborators, it needs connections, and it's almost the entire point.
[00:19:41] What I've been able to witness with you and some of what we've also coached on and talked about is, That willingness to reach out to people, the willingness to be someone who is enthusiastic, who is interested, and to just sharing that with other people has been so key to what you've been, to who you've been becoming really, and that the way that you are as an artist and how you've pulled this book together, but also how you're curating different experiences and events that are about bringing people together.
[00:20:13] Do you want to talk about that, that desire to bring people, I think you called it, bring people back to themselves and to each other? Yeah, underpinning this kind of web of connection around and informing the book and informing also what's coming. Yeah, I think, um, I guess a little bit of context around connection would be, uh, for a lot of my life I experienced Disconnection and a sense of alienation and not feeling part of anything or feeling like I was connected either to myself or to other people around me.
[00:20:54] Feeling different, feeling excluded, feeling weird. feeling like I was not quite in the right place. And I guess also waiting for people to make connection with me, like passive, a passive state of, of disconnection. And I had this conviction, this belief, a very strong belief that, that I, that connection was there and Potentially possible and in some way really important and almost like to a spiritual degree where it was like This this is a connected universe in some way, but I couldn't find a way into that I couldn't I couldn't find a point of connection with self or other and my enthusiasm and my curiosity and my interest in other people which has now become a kind of fundamental aspect of You How I make connection and why I make connection, that was always a suppressed aspect of self.
[00:21:55] It was a dangerous thing to express and I didn't believe that expressing it would, would have the effect that it is now having, which is Creating connection. I think maybe there's a like a lot of this goes unspoken. I think people reference connection obliquely or implicitly or um people talk about relationships in a way that doesn't necessarily get to the to the heart of of that connection the experience of connection the the value of connection the beauty of connection it's um connection is assumed and For me, it was something I had to, like, learn how to do.
[00:22:44] And I think being around other people where, and this includes you and the other people in the Unmasking Unschool, and other artists who I've now come into contact with, being around people who, you know, Also are talking about this as an explicit practice and has a as a thing that is beneficial to themselves and to others.
[00:23:08] Connection is a mutual benefit. It's not a selfish desire to connect to want to connect. I love being connected with and I love connecting with others. And it's, it's a, it's a two way thing, or it's more than two ways. It's, there's a, there's a feedback loop that spirals outwards from. a two person connection out into the world beyond.
[00:23:30] And I, I suppose this, what was a conviction, what was a belief that wasn't really backed up by practice in the past, once I started practicing connection and once I started experiencing connection and the, the kind of secondary benefits of connection, that became a, a feedback loop in itself. I guess I see, like, in society in general, there's a, in the UK at least, there's a, there's an absence of, of structures and institutions and venues.
[00:24:05] Gatherings for connection or for maybe for a particular type of deep connection that I'm interested in. And I think it's important to me to make work and to work with people who are interested in creating these kind of loose fluid structures and spaces, places, gatherings, events, whatever the form is.
[00:24:35] They, they provide some kind of container for and encouragement for connection. And that's, to me, what I want to do with my work, is to help form that connection between people and with themselves. Because if you don't have that connection with yourself, it is very difficult to then make that connection with other people.
[00:24:59] Because it's, it's based on something that is, you know, Disconnected in the first place having more options in yourself beyond, uh, what might be habituated or learned or taught socialized internalized responses to what is a space of risk relationship is a space of risk. And if our main source of interaction with other people.
[00:25:25] Has this strange ritual of small talk and unstructured interaction and these kind of floating spaces without being held in a shared experience already and being held in shared meanings and, and, and seen in the experiences that you're actually having, it can feel like the failure to stay connected, the failure to connect to others is something that, okay, that's my fault, or I'm doing it wrong, or can leave you judging yourself or feeling like you're bad at this.
[00:25:56] Um, when so much of that is just a consequence of what is missing in so many places and what I think so many of us are just really wanting bases to come together and be able to be in a shared experience and Feel that sense of belonging as an embodied, self connected experience that is happening in the body and with others and takes us out of that sense of, of isolation.
[00:26:26] But I think your ability to, to do that, to create these connections has come out of how much work you really have done to not perform a self, to not script, to not have those be the defaults. Maybe you're still doing them in times, maybe. it's useful to mask at times or in certain relationships where actually that space of risk doesn't offer the type of reward that you might think, or we might have elsewhere.
[00:26:56] But yeah, you've done so much on that and I want to just honor you for having the courage and the determination really to, to keep moving towards what, what was something that you wanted. And then now to be an example of that, to be offering that sense of belonging to other people, especially artists who are maybe practicing in ways that Don't automatically have the widest or most obvious routes to recognition or to institutional support and Yet are doing something so valuable and so meaningful and so Life giving in the sense of opening up.
[00:27:35] How do we be together? How do we be yourself? How do we express ourselves and what that culture can look like? So, talking about that, do you want to tell everyone what's going on on the 1st of November? It's not really a book launch, it's something completely different, but yeah, tell us. Yeah, well this is, this is an attempt to, to put into practice what I was just talking about and what you've just been talking about and it's a, it's a celebration, it's a gathering, it's a celebration of love and of the launch of the book.
[00:28:08] It's, it's going to be an experience more than a, a Zoom call, although it will take place on Zoom. There's going to be atmosphere, there's going to be sensory experience. And. The main thing that I want from it is for it to be a place where people can gather, um, and feel together, feel love, maybe feel curiosity, feel grief, feel excitement, and feel some sense of connection to other people without necessarily directly interacting, but By being in the same place together and by engaging with the work of the eight artists who are sharing work, it's um, it's going to be a kind of affective communal experience and it would be really great if anyone listening would like to come and try out this experience with me.
[00:29:11] There's going to be a mixture of work presented, there's going to be some readings from the book itself, there's going to be some poetry, people will be sharing their thoughts on love, there'll be videos and music, and the artists who are going to be playing. Performing are Sanghamitra, Saint-Saëns, Georgia, who I mentioned earlier, Rrangwane again, who's also got work in the book, Hannah Mae Buckingham, Florin Garzotto, Oscar Vinter, and Quieting has provided a beautiful music track that will be dropping in and out throughout the whole show, providing a sensory congruence to the whole thing.
[00:29:53] They're all bringing something different. They're all making different work and coming from different places and approaching love in a different way. But there's a, again, like the book, there's a connecting thread that I can see quite clearly. And I hope you'll experience that too. So it's free to attend and we'll put the link at the top of the show notes.
[00:30:19] One of the things that we've been working on together recently, that's been really fun is your relationship with the notion of beauty, especially in the context of, okay, in these relationships you've been building in your, all your personal relationships and just you with yourself claiming that you get to experience yourself as beautiful, how we show up in relationships in terms of a visual or how we self express ourself in terms of style.
[00:30:53] I feel like this is always a, you know, societally, this is something that's very focused on. It's not something often that I get to coach on. I get to explore with people and there's been a succession of things that we've worked on such as the experience of getting a haircut. That not being a total sensory and social hell and transforming that into it.
[00:31:19] It being something that you've described as pleasurable as well as, you know, how do you fully show up as yourself, fully self expressed in the relationships and the spaces and, you know, places and connections where that does feel available. and you've just recognized that you've not been doing it.
[00:31:35] You've not been fully being that and it feeling possible. And so it's been really fun to utilize the space of coaching as this kind of space to turn up the volume on what you'd claimed internally already be seen in that trying on clothes, thinking about style, thinking about how you want to make them your own, thinking about how does your taste fit with your body, your, you know, the colors that you like, your shape.
[00:32:03] What are the decision filters in terms of like how you want to dress? And, and also, and this may resonate with some people, I think you said in one session, how many lipsticks you'd collected over the years and just not really use. And suddenly you produced these pairs of shoes that I'd never seen. And this, this version of self that we, you know, that many of us, if we feel like we've been fitting in or kind of using, normative clothing or normative ways of being as a, as a kind of cover up and a way to stay under the radar and not, and not be seen to then go and do the opposite and to pull all of those things out and try them on and, and start being that.
[00:32:45] And so that's been super fun. Is there anything that you wanted to share around that, especially in the context of the notion of beauty, which has been a theme? Yeah, it's been super fun for me too. I think beauty like I experienced beauty all the time. I see beauty In the world around me constantly whoever i'm with it's always there and that became a point of disconnect in itself because it was like, you know, like why is beauty so present and I don't feel part of it or I feel like it's not something that i'm allowed to claim for myself or Something that i'm allowed to Reference or comment on I think there's a really nice loop that closed When I started to think about beauty as being related to self connection, because the things that I find beautiful so often, and this maybe applies more to humans, to people, self connection is beautiful, like seeing someone who is connected to themselves.
[00:33:54] and expressing that in a way that is observable to me from the outside. That is truly beautiful. And I think understanding that gave me the kind of like the connection between self connection and beauty and realizing that by doing these things, wearing these clothes, wearing the makeup, presenting myself, to myself in a way that felt aligned internally with myself.
[00:34:24] That created this experience, internal experience of beauty that wasn't necessarily about exactly how I looked, but it was about how I felt. And I think it, it, it's given me a sense of confidence that I don't need to embody normative. beauty standards in the way that like Society kind of creates a hierarchy of beauty where there's the most beautiful people who are like Special and different to everyone else in some way because they have this natural beauty that they've been blessed with Like you I don't need to I don't need to interact with that.
[00:35:02] It's it's about the connection that I feel with myself and The connection that other people feel with themselves, and then that creates a point of connection between people as well. I can recognize that form of beauty in other people. There's something to be said about gender here. I think, um, men and boys are not encouraged to be beautiful or to, you know, Investigate beauty, and maybe women and girls are encouraged to experience beauty in a quite specific way.
[00:35:36] And I guess I'm interested in finding a way that isn't mixes around the types of clothing, the types of accoutrement, the garb, the garments, the regalia, the whatever it is that you do to yourself to express something about yourself. Not being about. Not, not related to these kind of gender expectations, um, and being about this expression of self in the moment that you're creating that presentation of self.
[00:36:08] Yes, and that presentation of self not being dictated necessarily by how you're going to be read. How you've been social, how people are socialized to read you as male and being able to make clothing decisions that are about how you feel inside. Like you said, okay, this makes me feel femme. This makes me feel sexy or cute, pretty and allowing yourself to access that through clothing.
[00:36:34] Just taking what is an experience within to, to a more embodied space and then having the confidence to then do that. In relationships and in the places that you want to and be with others talking of being with others. There's not just the book that's coming out on the 1st of November. There's also the gathering.
[00:36:59] Wait, what's the name of the gathering on the? It's like one of those things where I it's got about three different names. Okay, I can always I never do I always do this Um, you can call it gathering of neuroqueering love the neuroqueering humans Instagram page at neuroqueering humans You can also search for Neuroqueering on Eventbrite and it's free and optional donations will go to an organization distributing water in Palestine.
[00:37:31] If none of those options work, DM me on Instagram and I'll send you a link. Gathering of Neuroqueering Love, 1st of November. Link is in the show notes and you'll also be able to learn more about the book then at the link, uh, to the Neuroqueer and Humans sites. Laurie, it's been just an enormous pleasure.
[00:37:54] Thank you for coming back on the podcast to share more of your story, more of what you've been working on. And you're an epic human being. I admire you so much for having so much courage to work through everything that you have and who you're being in the world. So thank you. Thank you, Louisa. I appreciate that a lot.
[00:38:16] Bye.
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