ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the work of Jon Adams – an artist who attributes some of his creativity and features of his work to his experiences of Asperger’s, Synaesthesia and Dyslexia. Adams is one of a growing number of self-identified D/deaf and D/disabled artists who are utilizing their distinctive cognitive and/or corporeal capacities to create work which plays with the emotions and imaginations of an audience. Aesthetic discourse often rests on the concept of a normative body (Fox and Macpherson 2015, Siebers 2010, Davidson 2008) however, the work of disabled artists, such as Adams, challenge such assumptions and build on the creativity which can stem from having a supposed disability. In this chapter we explore Adams’s work and the disability aesthetic it creates.
