Radiance: Joyful Neurodivergent Women

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Curatorial Statement: Radiance: Joyful Neurodivergent Women

In art theory, radiance is not merely a matter of light, but of transmission, an emanation of presence, aura, or affect. In this exhibition, radiance is reimagined through the lens of neurodivergent experience: nonlinear, intuitive, rhythmic, and embodied. It is not spectacle, but resonance. Not surface, but depth.

Here, radiance becomes a way of perceiving and a way of being. It moves through sensory logics that refuse the constraints of the normative gaze, unfolding instead in forms that honor interior tempo, personal circuitry, and the intensity of lived experience. The works gathered in Radiance: Joyful Neurodivergent Women exist in their own logic, their own pace, their own luminous integrity.

Drawing from affect theory, neuroaesthetics, and emerging conversations in atypical art discourse, this exhibition reframes joy as a radical site of meaning. Joy, here, is not decorative. It is a mode of resistance. It is epistemological. It carries knowledge, knowledge grounded in the body, in sensory attunement, in divergences that are often misunderstood or erased.

We celebrate the stimming hand as both mark-making and movement, a gesture that is at once functional, expressive, rhythmic, and creative. The stimming body becomes a generative force, producing patterns, traces, and textures that challenge traditional distinctions between fine motor control, affective regulation, and artistic expression.

We honor the nonlinear timeline: the way time folds, loops, and blurs in neurodivergent experience. Many of the works in this exhibition carry their own temporalities, spiraling rather than advancing, circling rather than concluding, echoing the internal architectures from which they emerge. This temporal multiplicity is not an anomaly; it is a form of radiance.

Throughout the exhibition, several themes converge:

• The tension between invisibility and hypervisibility that shapes many neurodivergent lives

• A critique of neurotypical perception as default, objective, or neutral

• The materiality of difference expressed as texture, rhythm, interruption, saturation, or minimality

• The joy of being understood, as well as the liberatory power of choosing not to be fully legible

Art history has long privileged coherence, mastery, and singular vision. Radiance asks: what becomes possible when we privilege sensory intelligence, and embodied knowledge instead? What happens when artistic value is not measured through conformity to dominant modes of perception, but through the depth and authenticity of divergent ways of knowing?

Let this be a space where neurodivergent joy is not translated, simplified, or explained away, but felt.

A space where radiance is not merely seen, but experienced in its full complexity: unfiltered, unapologetic, and free.