Ronan has been doing Random Not Random things for his whole life. Everything seems random - chaotic - nonsensical. Jabberwocky in life. But I’m certain he is telling emotional stories with these constructions. Sculptures is also accurate. It is both craft and art. He is synthesizing his experience of the world - telling the story of the movie in his head. Duchamp said that art was the space between the creative thought and the object thus produced. He meant it as an abstraction - a non-physical connection between the world of mind and the world of broken dreams. Ronan’s art captures that space because he is not typical. I think Ronan finds meaning embedded much more significantly and thoroughly than most.

Ronan’s art often is a means of coping with the ‘voice’ of his brain. Brains are perverse and try to trick us all the time. I tell Ronan that you must tell your brain what you want - don’t let it tell you. Elasticity of mind is gained through use. Ronan uses art to cope with emotional stresses.

What’s in the Glad Box? Fears? Hopes? Loops? Expectations? The Past? The Future? I don’t know…

The “Glad Box” - “Not Gardening” - and “Spring” all appeared in 2008. These pieces always just appear. Always have as noted.

I didn’t understand the Glad Box until 10 years later - a few weeks ago as I write this in fact - when he randomly started talking to me about why he sometimes tapes and wraps things up in boxes and bags. I didn’t understand but I believe he’s currently working on another sculpture on a parallel line - banishing some loop from his psyche.

Not Gardening involved every bin we owned. Old shirts. A shovel. Something got buried in the grass by the path. I know not what.

Spring was a random request from Ronan. Blue jello and then he picked things from the dollar store. Again it was about ten years later that its meaning became clearer. We were shooting a video of him explaining his long poem Bozforus - The Game. One of the lines is - The Creative Doing Thing - and he explained, ten years later and unprompted - that this is what the bowl of blue jello and butterflies and such was all about. The Creative Doing Thing.

The genesis of the Hard Cell was Bozforus Thing I suppose - more of that down the road - and Milbert Smirk was behind the Bozforus Thing. Milbert was one of Ronan’s characters for a while. He inhabits these characters he creates in the odd world between here and there.

I’d been trying to tap Ronan into his creative soul - the energy of mind that is so sustaining. But it was an ad hoc kind of thing - I spin and I’d try to grab him as I whipped by - pull him in - let him feel it - ride with me.

Then one day these pages appeared on my desk - like most of Ronan’s creative output - done with intensity and no consultation and then cast aside.

But it was a story. The story of Milbert Smirk. It was his first true narrative story… a linear dialogue with his audience about a life sequence.

I lie actually… his first narrative story was Smoking Girl… but more of that later too. But from Smoking Girl to Milbert Smirk I realized that Ronan was developing new brain structures - ones that showed the beginning of an ability to create more neurotypical - emotionally based narratives. These were neural architectures that I don’t think he possessed when he was born. They weren’t genetically programmed.

Ronan’s Washing Machine Art began spinning in 2008. He experimented with all kinds and textures of things in the machine. He would stand for hours, using different combinations of colors of objects in the sloshing water.

Toys. Dishes. Flags. Books. Any he could get away with before we stopped him. ;-)> But some gave him extra delight.

These Washing Machine Sculptures perfectly encapsulate Ronan’s aesthetic at the time - and his approach to narrative. Incredibly kinetic and chaotic. Full of color and motion and sound and texture - all things that, on their own, could overwhelm and disturb him.

He is seeing something else when he watches these patterns he is making - living sculptures - and whatever he is seeing is triggering emotion - flushes of endorphins in his brain.

I believe there is narrative here - an emotional structure that Ronan feels. It is a common if subtle theme throughout all his artistic expression over the years. Are these pictures of mind? Of emotional states? Or of a story he is telling inside himself. There is a movie he watches in his head I think - a story of life that is parallel to the one we can see. Ronan is always doing this - seeming to watch the movie of our neurotypical reality beside the movie of his own reality in his head. These two movies intersect but don’t match up…

The non-neurotypical mind understands narrative differently. So I try to imagine the lives of these balloons…

The beginning.

Ronan wasn’t diagnosed with ASD until he was 7. His original drawings and art - which he had almost no interest in creating - can be seen in the first pictures - flowers in one and a flag in the other. Direct representation of things was not part of his creative psyche.

His spontaneous art - which began to appear around age 4 - is shown in the organization of his cans of Pediasure and syringes on the stairs (Syringes and Pediasure) - which led to the balloons in his room (If Balloons Could Talk) - and the other strange creations with toothbrushes (Oral Aversion) and taping things to walls (Tree of Uncertainty).

Ronan never played like a neurotypical kid - mostly breaking things and constructing makeshift dumpsters everywhere - but he would suddenly create these odd everyday sculptures for no apparent reason other than releasing the aesthetic energy he felt.

Ronan's experiments with kinetic art revolved around the washing machine for a while.

He would wash different categories of things - but always stood on a stool and watched the whole process - from filling to spinning. And he would engage with it. Alter it.

Why do I call this kinetic art? I think autistic kids engage in a lot of kinetic art. Much of this is physical - kind of like non-neurotypical modern dance. I think Ronan was always sensitive to the world - autistic kids are - and yet he always engaged light and color and form and sound and texture to create these moving sculptures.

Maybe it was a form of self-therapy - I'd often be mesmerized by the swirling froth of color and sound that Ronan created. Again there is narrative - but of geometry and texture. A narrative of the physical forces of Ronan's world. To me this signifies a pure connection to the creative mind.

Ronan’s spin…

Kinetic art. 2008

Ronan has a fascination now with creating characters. I think he’s always done this - populated his own life with a rich secondary cast of imagined people. But when he was younger he could never articulate the conversations he was having in his head. Almost everything he did was kinetic in nature - he had endless curiosity unbound by an executive voice - moved fast - and learned by touching/moving/shaking/breaking.

Ronan was interested in water balloons for a brief period - which are strange objects to begin with. He always had a problem with textures, but these squishy balloons delighted him. He twisted heads into them and I’m sure he was conversing with them on a wavelength I wasn’t tuned into…

… then he’d chortle and race outside and dash them to death on the concrete path. After that he’d examine the stain - the residue of their expiration - with great seriousness - then rush back inside to inflate his next victim.

Sin something…

The Life of Sunction