Cultural Olympiad:
Look About
‘Look About’ was a creatively driven, multilayered project weaving together geological metaphor with art led by artist/ geologist Jon Adams.
The two-year project involved collecting, capturing and interpreting material gathered from D/deaf and disabled artists, audiences, and cultural organisations involved in the Cultural Olympiad and the Accentuate programmes. The main aim was to map any ‘shifts’ in attitudes to the work of disabled artists.
Jon mapped 800,000 minutes of personal and Cultural Olympiad experiences. As a trained field geologist, his ‘Mapping’ days included Accentuate and Inspire Mark projects, Torch Relays and Open Weekends. All the drawings, observations and field notes will be presented together as a digital Geological Map of the Cultural Olympiad in the South East, with keys and explanation booklets.
Between June 2011 and September 2012, tens of thousands of people at 19 exhibitions engaged with fragments of ‘Look About’ including graphics, films and ‘found fossils’ as well as following online and through social media. The project encouraged people to record their lives in different ways; it has proved especially popular with young people and drawn considerable interest from the wider scientific community.
The project has led to further high profile projects, and Jon becoming the subject of a chapter in an academic geographical paper published in 2013. It also led to partnerships with the University of Portsmouth, where Jon is Artist in Residence, the British Geological Survey and Jon becoming Artist in Residence at the Autism Research Centre (ARC) at Cambridge University where he is working with Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, funded by the Wellcome Trust. The work of the ARC is of great interest to Jon as an artist with Asperger Syndrome (which is just one of his disabilities).
“It is important to communicate autism research to a wider public, but equally, it is important that people with autism have the opportunity to take what we do and portray it in their own words, or in this case, their own imagery. Just as the results of science are unpredictable, so the results of this artistic and creative dialogue will also be unpredictable, but we can be sure they will be highly novel and will provoke a lot of discussion. Jon’s background as a geologist gives him a firm grasp of how to map time and history and events, and his own autism gives him a terrific eye for detail, spotting details that others miss. The result is an artist who uses the science of geology to portray a new way of looking at the world.”
— Professor Baron-Cohen, University of Cambridge
Images: Courtesy of the artist