In the first of a new series of interviews with prominent people in the visual arts sector, Disability Arts Online Associate, Revell Dixon talks to visual artist, writer and consultant Sonia Boué.

Revell Dixon: Hello, my name is Revell Dixon. I am a black man wearing glasses, with short hair and a long jacket. Welcome to a brand-new series called Journey Into Arts, where I will be interviewing people who are well known in the art sector, as well as learning about the process when it comes to creating new work. Today, I am in Oxford, where I’ll be meeting Sonia Boué, who is a multi-form artist specialising in collage, and is a consultant in the art sector.

Sonia Boué: I’m a pale white woman with midlength salt and pepper wavy mullet, and I’m wearing brown rimmed octagonal glasses and a black top.

Revell Dixon: What was your journey in art?

Sonia Boué: I took a scenic route into an art practice. Looking back, I now feel I was excluded from art education due to my hidden disabilities, and I think art education is an inherently ableist system. I thought deeply about this when I worked with the NSEAD on the anti-ableist AD Magazine, issue 35. My interview helped me consider myself to have been excluded, despite longing to be an artist since I was seven. I have a visual impairment and Dyspraxia, which I didn’t know about at the time. I loved art, but I felt a deep shame about my lack of co-ordination. My first degree was in History of Art. I trained as an Art Therapist, and most importantly, there was an experiential painting group, which was part of my course. It was process-led, intuitive and non-judgmental, and it forms the basis of my current practice. It made me an artist. As a student, I thought I was just painfully shy. I couldn’t talk to my tutors or even look at them in tutorials. I didn’t know I was Autistic. I can’t imagine myself being at art school back then, because I had no idea you could be an artist like me.

Revell Dixon: What is your process when creating new work? What are biggest challenges?

Sonia Boué: I generally like to experiment and let instinctive logic take over. It’s an organic process, I have to feel my way in each time a new project presents itself. It also depends on the work itself. Quite often the subject dictates the form and I’m happy to work across forms that I’m currently most interested in -photography and collage. If the project is about something external to me, I try and find out everything I can about the subject. Usually, one detail will draw my attention and that becomes the hook that enables me to start making. If the work is more autobiographical, and about the lived experience, my research is usually maker-led. I need to externalise and I need something to work from, so I make a lot of process works until I get a sense of what I’m doing. I have to immerse myself in making to figure it out. I’m trying to make new work again, following my Neurophototherapy project, which in one form or another has occupied the last four years. I’m working on a much smaller, sometimes tiny scale, with a view to scaling up. I don’t use sketchbooks much. I work on found surfaces, which I often cut down. But these process works are sketches, and I store them in boxes. I’ve developed so many strands to my practice that are not studio based. A lot of my funded work is related to my practice, but doesn’t involve making. Running publicly funded projects requires a lot of project management, and last year I also wrote two publications. I get more recognition for my advocacy work than my art practice, so I spend a lot of time feeling frustrated, because I want to make work and I lack time and the focus for it. I could do with a sabbatical for making. I also think that articulating what I do is hard, because Neurodivergent practice is something we’re still figuring out. Artists like me are trying to speak to lived experiences that have only ever been observed from the outside before. The joy of it, is that it’s innovative and important. But the sector has a lot of catching up to do. When you have a practice like mine. There’s a danger of being othered and this makes me incredibly careful about what I share in public.

Revell Dixon: Show me an object that is relates to your work. Can you tell us about it and why it is important to you?

Sonia Boué: I want to talk about a book called Neurophototherapy: Playfully Unmasking with Photography and Collage. It’s a book I wrote, and the cover image is a photograph of me as a child, standing in a dark green doorway with a blue plastic toy spear. I’m wearing a red and green checked wool dress, which I remember was very scratchy. The book is the culmination of more than a decade of research, and it also reflects on my life as a late discovered Neurodivergent person. The idea is to share the joyful and empowering practice I’ve developed, both as a solo artist and with a focus group of late discovered Neurodivergent women. It’s been published so the other late discovered people can also benefit from it. The method involves reclaiming our pre-masking selves and reconnecting with the sparky kid who knew who they were, and didn’t mask. This is so needed because late discovery can be a very significant life event, and there’s very little support and understanding for it. Diagnosis and self discovery are often treated as an end point, when actually, people may need to undergo what I see as an identity transition. We often need to unlearn unhelpful normative conditioning, which includes internalised ableism. This can be gnarly and bewildering, especially for people who are newly discovered.

Revell Dixon: What is your favourite place to visit?

Sonia Boué: In my dreams, I’m back in the district of Barcelona, called the Barceloneta, as it was in my childhood before the tourist invasion and the Olympics development of the early 1990s. I’m Anglo-Spanish, and I miss shuttling between Birmingham and Barcelona to visit my grandparents’ tiny dusty flat, I was brought up in a family separated by political exile, and these journeys are imprinted in my memory and form part of my DNA. It’s a mythical place now, because the Barceloneta as it was no longer exists. It’s been overrun by tourists and the port is unrecognisable from how it was back in the day. But I go back often in my imagination, and have done so many times in my art practice. In fact, revisiting my grandparents’ flat creatively has led to a whole body of works that exists in an archive on my website. This work took place between 2013 and 2019, and I’m about to make some new work that relates to it.

Revell Dixon: What would you be if you weren’t an artist?

Sonia Boué: If I wasn’t an artist, I’d probably be a writer. What I’d most like to be as a clown, but I hope I’d be a funny clown and not scary!

Revell Dixon: What’s the one thing you would change about the visual arts sector?

Sonia Boué: I tried to bang the drum for the digital space. The digital offer is as vital now as it was during lockdowns. I grieve for the loss of it. So many of us are locked out of cultural opportunities because we’re unable to access spaces in real life. It can take days of planning and recovery to access a single event, which is not doable for many people. It’s also horribly expensive. We know digital poverty exists too, and that’s another question. I want to see more development of online spaces and forms too. I’m not technically minded, but if I was I’d be working to innovate in this area. Visual arts needs to think beyond online work as a substitute for in-real-life work. I’ve run two successful Arts Council England funded projects entirely online for access reasons, and it’s been transformational. We all know that in real life experiences are different. You pick up very different data, which means that those who can’t access it, really do miss out. We owe it to a significant group of people to do better and provide cultural enrichment and opportunity that is equal to what goes on in real life.