Short Bio:

Elinor Rowlands MA FRSA is an interdisciplinary artist, sound artist, filmmaker and art psychotherapist whose practice explores neurodivergence, crip and queer world-making, sensory experience and more-than-human ecologies. Working across sound, moving image, immersive arts and installation, they create dreamy world-building and phantasmagorical landscapes where melancholy, multiplicity and transformation open up alternative ways of sensing, relating and imagining other worlds.

Longer Bio:

Elinor Rowlands MA FRSA is an interdisciplinary artist, sound artist, filmmaker, art psychotherapist, crip doula, Autism/ADHD coach, Specialist Mentor (Mental Health and Autism), and practice-based PhD researcher working at the intersections of art, disability, neurodivergence, access, embodiment and crip/queer world-making. 

Moving between artistic practice, research, facilitation, training and community organising, their work explores alternative ways of sensing, relating, learning and being together. She approaches access and care not as accommodations to existing structures, but as generative practices through which different worlds, temporalities and forms of knowledge can emerge.

Working across moving image, expanded cinema, sound, photography, painting, sculpture, collage, performance, movement, immersive arts, and installation, Elinor explores autistic perception, crip and queer temporalities, dark ecologies and more-than-human relations. Their practice attends to touch, intimacy, vulnerability, repetition, rhythm and sensory excess, challenging normative visual, cognitive and temporal frameworks. Their current research investigates autistic stimming within interiority as a method of thinking, sensing and making, exploring how repetition, texture, rhythm and sensory association generate alternative aesthetic and epistemological possibilities.

Elinor has a longstanding commitment to creating spaces and platforms led by marginalised communities. She founded the UK's first neurodivergent-led space specifically for autistic and ADHD women, trans folk and other marginalised identities via their arts project, Magical Women. In 2019, they published a book featuring contributions from 49 women artists and artists from marginalised identities, stocked by the Live Art Development Agency's bookshop in London, UK. 

Elinor’s work has appeared in independent publications, anthologies and peer-reviewed academic journals spanning dance, music, performance and visual art. They were also included on an album released by NMC Recordings, described as the first dedicated to disabled composers and musicians.

In China, Elinor ran a voluntary, non-profit collective that renovated an orphanage and supported the mibility of bedbound and disabled children, and they helped establish free, accessible education for a Deaf school with her Chinese university students. The school was subsequently taken over by the government, with Deaf pupils housed in an accessible building. The initiative received regular coverage in Quzhou Daily and Zhejiang Daily.

As an art psychotherapist and crip doula, Elinor brings a relational, embodied and care-led approach to supporting people through change and transformation. Elinor's leadership, training and facilitation explore how crip and queer perspectives can reshape spaces, institutions and collective practices around access, interdependence and alternative rhythms of participation.

Elinor has presented internationally, including in Canada, Iceland, Poland, Amsterdam, Portugal, Luxembourg and across the UK. They recently convened a symposium exploring multilayering as method, embodied practices, care and access. Across their work, they approach access as a creative and political methodology, exploring how crip and queer ways of sensing, relating and inhabiting time might enable more liveable, interconnected and imaginative worlds.

Elinor’s work is also informed by experiences of displacement, cultural difference and the complexities of inhabiting multiple worlds, including their community work in China from 2005-2010. Across their practice, melancholy, dissociation and states of liminality are approached not simply as symptoms or pathologies, but as potential methods of perception, transformation and world-making. 

Wetness, tears, menstruation, intrusive thoughts, memory, heritage, breath, peat bogs and more-than-human ecologies recur as material, sensory and conceptual presences, opening questions around permeability, decomposition, transformation and the unstable boundaries between bodies and environments. 

Through wetness, Elinor explores connections between transness, the concept of feeling too much, "cry baby", feeling like a ghost, haunting, fluidity and becoming, unsettling fixed categories of identity, embodiment and belonging. 

Multiplicity, duality, doubling, multilayering and density operate as both conceptual frameworks and material processes, allowing contradictory states, fragmented experiences and overlapping realities to coexist without requiring resolution. 

Breath becomes a point of encounter between interiority and exteriority, presence and absence, intimacy and dissolution. Through these entanglements, Elinor explores how melancholy, estrangement, sensory difference and altered states of attention might generate alternative forms of knowledge, intimacy and relation, opening spaces for experiences that exceed singular identities, linear narratives and normative understandings of embodiment.