Bio

Fritha Jenkins is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in London. Their practice combines performance, ceramics, video, sculpture, installation, sound and movement. Performances and exhibitions include work shown with ArtHouses Whitley Bay, on the Thames river foreshore, at Artsadmin, on their kitchen table, at Guest Projects, Chisenhale Dance space, in a transit van, at Modern Art Oxford and at Supernormal festival. 

Artist Statement 

Work is relational and emerges in conversation with situations, people, environments and materials; washing up bowls, quarries, frozen bathwater, friends, dripping wastewaters, rocks, cats, ovens. My practice stumbles around intersections of domesticity, care, feminism, queerness, land/waterscapes and neurodivergent thinking. I utilise improvisation, humour and gesture in the layering of multisensory work. Churning up materials, landscapes, archives, and narratives I stumble around and through messy explorations of alternative ecologies. 

Why MW is important:

I’m a late diagnosed Autistic artist and it’s been wonderful to discover what you’re doing with magical women – thank you!

Bio

I’m a creative writer, arts journalist and reviewer based in Bristol, UK. I’m mum to two AuDHD children and was diagnosed with ADHD in 2021 at the age of 44. I studied an MA in Creative and Critical Writing at Birkbeck College (University of London) from 2021-2023. I started writing in 2019, and my first piece of creative nonfiction was published by Magical Women on their website in 2020 and in Volume 1 of their print magazine in 2021. I’ve since had creative nonfiction published in The Mechanics Institute Review and a personal essay about ADHD creativity and temporality  in Oranges Journal. Recently I have been shortlisted for The Curae Prize 2023 for nonfiction, and long-longlisted for The Brick Lane Short Story Prize 2023. My shortlisted creative nonfiction piece Palmistry is due to be published by Renard Press in November 2023 in the Curae Anthology My music journalism has been published in God is in the TV and Bristol247, and literature reviews in The Mechanics Institute Review. My opinion and editorial writing have been featured in The Everyday Magazine, where I was Music and Arts Editor from 2020 until 2021, and then Chief Culture Editor until June 2022 Throughout 2020 I ran 19 Stories, a project archiving people’s stories from the Covid-19 pandemic. I also have extensive experience of writing and researching articles for Bristol Autism Support, a charity providing information and support services to parents and carers of autistic children and adults, and working with therapists and visual artists to develop their website written content.

Artist Statement 

My current creative writing practise centres my lived experience of neurodivergence, creativity, and motherhood, weaving elements of memoir with philosophical and cultural theory. I am currently working on a long-form project exploring ADHD, rhythm, and temporality, which aims to give voice to neurodivergent women’s experiences of being misunderstood and othered, particularly the misdiagnosed and late-diagnosed. I am also exploring place writing and psychogeography through the themes of displacement, hauntology, and memory in a series of short stories and memoir-based creative nonfiction set around the M32 motorway in my home city of Bristol.

Why MW is important:

My writing piece Conduit which Magical Women published was the very first piece of my creative writing published anywhere – it gave me the impetus to continue writing, and it means so much to me. I decided to apply for my MA shortly afterwards and I’ve just handed my dissertation in, and I’m set to get a distinction, so just know you’ve made a huge difference to my creative life! 

Bio

Dorothea Deli (any pronouns) is a cultural analyst, curator and neurodiversity activist. She is autistic and has ADHD. She has academic degrees in psychology, art history, cultural analysis and gender studies. Her professional experience spans across jobs at Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Stapferhaus Lenzburg and her own collaborative off space Kein Museum in Zurich. Currently she is working on her own project “Doing Neuroqueerness”, which deals with neurodiversity and autism in particular from a philosophical and critical disability studies perspective. Her artistic practice lies within sculpting, drawing, painting and installation projects.

Artist Statement

My art revolves around what I call the autistic bodymind. It’s about how my idiosyncratic kind of subjectivity cannot function oblivious to the body. My body is very sensitive, it insists, it changes how I think, feel and perceive. The Cartesian distinction between body and mind makes no sense to me. Conceiving of body and mind as connected in my art practice also means that I do not orientate myself on purely mental symbolic identity markers, but much rather on mental-material interdependencies, potentials and possibilities to be connected with other living beings, impressions and emotions.

Why MW is important:

For me, Magical Women is important, because being autistic or disabled in general means to be excluded from so many possibilities and from vital connections with community. Magical Women created their own community, which is essential to have to be able to thrive. Being part of a safe community is being given an opportunity to express themselves and in this way to be able to participate in something greater. Self-expression generally still follows neuronormative pathways and is thus exclusive towards neurodivergent people, yet self-expression is the key to connecting with other people and a life worth living.

Bio

In the system we’re in, I’m a journalist, a life coach, and a teacher; in life, I’d just say I like hearing and telling stories. The human mind is wired for narratives. My grandparents were all scholars: Grandma taught art, taught me to knit and sew; Granddad carved, took photos, taught history. He sang to me, read and told me stories. Naani sewed, wrote, recited the Qur’an. Cooked and gardened, too. They each passed on practices around gathering and sharing their own knowledge and experiences of the universe through creation.

Artist Statement

I make voiceovers for short documentaries; I dance; I make food; I grow things. I try to uncover stories within whatever I’m doing. Capturing images, poetry, drawing, journalism, teaching, dancing. I believe there’s a point at which all facets of an individual’s intelligence –however cultivated they are in one area or another– converge to create our own unique experience of the world. Some use words like ‘soul’, ‘awareness’, ‘consciousness’, the ‘self’.

Why MW is important

When we create, in our unique way, we’re stringing together those facets of human intelligence – cognitive, proprioceptive, and so on, particularly emotional. We’re transforming our own experience as an individual into part of something bigger, a collective intelligence. And collective is what Magical Women is all about. There’s nothing more uplifting and inspiring than seeing others choose to come together over creating, sharing knowledge, and experience. That’s why I wanted to be added to the directory.

Artist Statement

I live, create, connect and express myself in a multi-sensory world, blending creative writing, visual art, movement, digital media and healing arts. In arts and wellbeing projects and residencies, I co-create with diverse groups and communities. As a yoga and movement teacher, I teach creative movement and work in wellbeing. I am a lowland walking leader, am a trained life coach, and offer 1-1 creative journey mentoring via zoom. I am currently a PhD student at Aberystwyth University, researching landscape, ecofeminism and creative arts. I am neurodivergent and discovered my neurotype is autistic in 2023 at the age of 40.