Biostratigraphy and Disability art: an introduction to the work of Jon Adams

This chapter focuses on the work of Jon Adams – an artist who attributes some of his creativity and features of his work to his experiences of Asperger’s, Synaesthesia and Dyslexia. Adams is one of a growing number of self identified D/deaf and D/disabled artists who are utilizing their distinctive cognitive and/or corporeal capacities to create work which plays with the emotions and imaginations of an audience. Aesthetic discourse often rests on the concept of a normative body (Davidson 2008; Siebers 2010) however, the work of disabled artists, such as Adams, challenge such assumptions and build on the creativity which can stem from having a supposed disability. In this chapter we explore Adams’s work and the disability aesthetic it creates.