00:00Throughout the nine years I've been working with this particular group of artists I have
00:26seen every one of them come through real emotional difficulties. Art is a great way of helping
00:33us not necessarily verbally understanding what we're going through but to be able to
00:38express it in a very silent way. Some of our artists are able to have small discussions
00:46around how they feel and their emotions, some of them are non-verbal.
00:55So we hold our major summer show at the Margate School of Arts in Margate. We have benefited
01:01greatly from exhibiting in Margate and particularly at the school. It's been six years of collaboration,
01:07we've seen the Margate School grow and we've grown alongside them. Our exhibitions when
01:13you walk into them doesn't shout out disability, it shouts out colour, it shouts out joy.
01:27So taking Tylenol is not good. I'll say it, it's not good.
01:35I was heartbroken. Remember the comments about President Trump? It upset me because partly
01:46as a woman it felt very much as attack against women. Once again it was the patriarchy, it
01:51was like yes you are a woman, you've done this, it's your fault. What makes me angry is that
01:56we wouldn't be as a society, we wouldn't be where we are if we didn't have people with
02:01neurodivergence. If we didn't have a lot of the scientific and medical and mathematical
02:09society, we need neurodivergence, we need that different perspective. And also it'd just be
02:15really boring if we were all the same.
02:19Trump said that the prevalence of autism should be none. They spoke about ending autism. Secretary
02:25Kennedy again said autism destroys families. It was just like a press conference that was very
02:33promoting a view of autism that we try not to use anymore in the autistic advocacy space,
02:38certainly in the autistic advocacy space, but in the broader autism advocacy space as well.
02:42This view that autism is a tragedy that needs to be ended. And we know now, thanks to research into
02:48autism, that that's not going to happen. There will not be a cure. And what we should be focusing on
02:54is making quality of life better for autistic people who are here today.
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