VIENNA DRYSDALE BISCHARD: AUTISTIC ARTISTIC

As a practicing artist with Autism, Vienna Drysdale Bischard's art practice and research examines how Autism affects her art, as well as how her art making encapsulates Autism.

In a series of self-portraits, alongside friends’ portraits and objects of personal significance, Bischard translates childhood memories and feelings of ‘difference’ as well as the ways in which she sought comfort and connection.

Bischard’s sense of ‘difference’ is also relayed though a series of line drawings depicting figures that are at once familiar, yet transformed by Augmented Reality (AR), triggering abstracted imagery with digitally enhanced voicescapes. Here, by distorting the viewers’ sense of familiarity, Bischard expresses the process of daily masking and modelling techniques for those with Autism, in an effort to ‘normalise’ their emotional responses and appear ‘normal’ and acceptable to others.

Concerned with medical research and suggested solutions to cure Autism through genetic and behavioural research, Bischard’s work also seeks to oppose suggested cures: rather to reorganise societal thinking to understand that Autistic people do not require healing or any form of medical fix.

Vienna Drysdale Bischard is supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Fee-Offset Scholarship through Federation University.