Childhood Memories – recall in neurodivergent young adults
Project details
- Year
- 2023
- Programme
- Bachelor – Illustration
- Practices
- Social
- Minor
- Cultural Diversity
Childhood memories is a project surrounding the recall of memories in neurodivergent people in combination with nostalgia. As a neurodivergent person with bad storage and recall abilities I find it difficult to remember things. Ironically a lot of my work centers around nostalgia and the desire to bring childlike designs into adult life. My aim for this project was to aid in the recall of childhood memories of myself and others and use the results as inspiration for my work.
For this project I created workshops surrounding three themes of childhood. The themes are childhood bedrooms, clothing and toys. In these workshops I used techniques that I explored in my thesis that aid in improving working memory. By improving working memory, which is part of the short-term memory that focuses on the execution of cognitive tasks, you can strengthen the ability to create long-term memory storage and recall. In the workshops I guided the participants in recalling memories surrounding the themes using visualisation and the five senses.
By drawing, we were able to trigger memories in ourselves as well as each other allowing us to remember more clearly. Each moment of recall alters the memory you’re trying to retrieve. As the memories I’m trying to help recall are quite old and experienced through the lens of a child I’m not aiming for perfection rather the feelings associated with the memories. With the results of the workshops, I have created three prints inspired by our combined childhood memories.
