Unmasking Through Art: Cultivating A Creative Practice for Emotional Well-Being 

This is a guest blog by Danni Stewart, a multidisciplinary artist and creative producer based on Gadigal Land, written as part of our Yellow Ladybugs Mentoring Series. In this powerful and affirming reflection, Danni explores how rediscovering creative hobbies from fibre arts to writing has supported their journey of unmasking, regulation, and reconnection as an Autistic adult.

Danni shares how creating art outside of clinical frameworks can be a vital form of self-regulation and reflection. Through personal storytelling, they show how art can support emotional processing, act as a soothing stim, and foster community especially in neurodivergent and disability-led spaces. With humour, honesty, and clarity, Danni challenges perfectionism and reclaims creativity as something radical, nourishing, and just for them.

This blog reminds us that creative practice doesn’t need to be productive or polished to be powerful and that returning to joy, play, and art can be a deeply affirming part of any Autistic self-care routine.

Readers will take away:

• A relatable account of unmasking through creative practice and reconnecting with childhood passions
• Insight into how activities like crochet, weaving, and writing can support emotional regulation and serve as stims
• Reflections on the importance of creating art outside of productivity culture just for joy, comfort, and self-expression
• A celebration of Disability-led arts spaces and the power of connecting with other Autistic creatives
• Encouragement to explore creativity on your own terms, even if it’s just scribbling for the fun of it

For a significant period of my life I didn’t have any hobbies. At some point around Year 7 and the shift to high school I ditched all the creative activities that had brought me joy in childhood and zeroed in on my new special interest – people. Of course now I realise that all the time I would spend analysing people and social behaviours was masking. 

Spending hours upon hours trying to understand social norms felt like a necessary survival tactic. I spent all my spare time analysing those around me as well as the teenage girls depicted in the TV shows I watched. Researching, taking notes, building up a manual for how I felt I should be in order to fit in. 

Now as part of my attempts to un-mask as an Autistic adult I’m trying to spend less time on these anthropological case studies that ate up huge amounts of my energy as a teenager and in my early 20s. Instead I’ve been redirecting that energy to creating art and reconnecting with the creative hobbies that I used to enjoy as a kid. 

The therapeutic benefits of engaging with and making art are well documented. Art Therapy is a staple of psychiatric patient care. But less talked about are the benefits of cultivating your own personal creative art practice outside of a clinical setting. Engaging with and creating art not with specific therapeutic goals in times of crisis but rather as an everyday practice to ground your nervous system. 

Personally, I’ve found cultivating my own creative practice incredibly therapeutic in three key ways: 

Art as processing 

Joan Didion said that writing was her way of processing her thoughts – an idea I find deeply relatable. Often when I feel the urge to create something it comes from trying to figure out how I feel. I find creating art in all different mediums is a useful way to sort through my own brain clutter and this is especially true for writing. Although it’s not something that came to me naturally.  

I’ve tried journaling, I’ve tried morning pages and neither really work for me. There’s something about it that makes me feel a bit strange and I can’t quite put my finger on what it is. As an alternative, I’ve started writing in a style that could be categorised as autofiction. Autofiction being autobiographical fiction – a kind of writing based to an extent on their author’s real life experiences but with some details like names, places etc. changed. 

As a reflective practice, I’ve been writing stories that are grounded in my own experience but changed enough so there feels like a degree of separation. There’s something about the degree of separation that I find incredibly useful. As to why I find it easier to write reflectively this way I’m not sure – perhaps it’s something I should work through in therapy. But anyway it’s a method that’s working for me! So if you’ve always wanted to journal but couldn’t get into it, I would recommend trying this approach. And if writing isn’t your thing, there are of course infinite creative mediums to express yourself through and use as a vehicle for processing your feelings. 

Art as stimming 

In primary school I became obsessed with knitting. Part of the Year 2 curriculum was French Knitting which we did using a toilet paper roll with paddlepop sticks taped around as a makeshift spool. I loved the repetitive movement of creating stitch after stitch after stitch. At the time I wasn’t diagnosed Autistic so had no idea why the repetition was so soothing to me. But of course now I realise that knitting for me was a satisfying stim. 

Wanting to reconnect with fibre arts I recently started knitting again and taught myself how to crochet. In crocheting I’ve found that same calmness I felt french knitting in primary school. I also went through a period of being really into weaving as a kid and made a loom out of cardboard. This is the next project I have planned to use up all the scraps of yarn I’ve been collecting from crochet.

A lot of fibre arts involve repetitive movements that can be incredibly satisfying; knitting, crochet, weaving, needle punching…there’s so many artforms you can explore! These activities can be a fun, low-cost way to regulate your nervous system. While some spend a lot of money on fancy yarn you don’t actually need to spend much money at all. You can pull apart an old sweater for yarn, find needles and hooks on Facebook Marketplace, build a loom out of a shoe box, a spool from a toilet paper roll etc. And working with materials that are already in the waste cycle not only makes your craft a lot cheaper, it’s also more sustainable. 

*A little note of caution that if, like me, you’re a hypermobile Autistic make sure you take lots of breaks to protect your joints. Crochet and knitting can be hard on our fingers and wrists and all that satisfying repetitive movement can result in injury. 

Art as community 

Art is community building. Engaging with art created by other Autistics has been essential in my journey of understanding myself. I’ve found a deep sense of connection and shared identity through Autism memoirs like Fern Brady’s ‘Strong Female Character,’ representation on TV like Chloe Hayden in Heartbreak High and of course through content creators who make relatable reels about the Autistic experience.  

But finding community for me hasn’t been exclusively through art that is explicitly about Autism. In 2023 at the Whitney Museum in New York I stumbled across Flower Abstraction by Georgia O’Keefe. I was stunned. I stood there staring at this painting for a long time. It felt like it somehow validated an Autistic way of being that I hadn’t realised I’d been repressing. Flower Abstraction is part of a series of paintings Georgia O’Keefe created showing flowers very close-up. 

More recently, when going through my box of childhood things, I found an old SD card filled with blurry close-up photos of flowers. The SD card was from the point and shoot camera I’d been given for Christmas in Year 4. That summer, I’d spend the school holidays taking extreme close up shots of the flowers in my grandparent’s garden. There is of course a connection between these blurry photos my ten-year-old self took and my obsession with Georgia O’Keefe’s close-up paintings of flowers. 

I find the close-up detail of Georgia O’Keefe’s work resonates with the way I see the world – focusing on the detail. Her paintings unlock that part of me that I’ve tried to suppress after being told that it’s bad to get hung up on small details and more important to see ‘the big picture.’ It’s worth noting that there is speculation that Georgia O’Keefe was Autistic.  

Of course art galleries aren’t the most accessible spaces. Personally I find large galleries pretty overwhelming and often end up with sensory overload. But more galleries are introducing quiet hours and making their collections available online which means you can engage with beautiful artworks from your bed! The Art Gallery of NSW in Sydney has started hosting sensory friendly sessions on Wednesday evenings along with Disability focused programming. It's worth looking up if galleries near you do the same and if they don’t contact them and ask if they would consider introducing a quiet hour. 

In addition to finding a sense of community through engaging with art I’ve also found connection with other artists to be incredibly healing. I was recently part of a writer’s group that was specifically for Disabled writers. While I’ve taken part in other creative workshop type setups before something about an Autonomous Disability-led space hit different. There was a shared understanding that to be Disabled is to live a life in flux and an acceptance of each other in whatever way we were able to show up week to week. 

This writing group was facilitated by a wonderful arts org and we’re seeing increasing institutional support from arts orgs, galleries, etc. investing in creating Disability-led artist spaces which is wonderful. But we can also build our own spaces for creative community and connection. Whether that’s something structured like a weekly writers group, making a zine or simply making plans for a crafternoon with an Autistic friend.  

A note on art and perfectionism 

It’s common for Autistics who aren’t socialised as men to end up with an intense perfectionism complex which can make us incredibly hard on ourselves. So I think it's important to end on the note that when it comes to creating art as a therapeutic practice you don’t need to show it to anyone else! For me the idea of being perceived by others can trigger demand avoidance, perfectionism and spiralling into despair. 

I’ve had to reckon with this as there was a time when I felt like something was only worth working on if I was going to share it. With capitalist nonsense crowding my brain space, I felt like I had to spend all my time productively. So if I was going to spend time making it art it needed to somehow be tied to my career goals. But now I’ve taken the pressure off and discovered the sublime joy of making things for no audience. Creating art that is just for my own enjoyment feels like a radical rejection of socially ingrained ideas about time and productivity.

That pressure to be productive can eat away at us even when it comes to creative hobbies that we started for fun. It’s important not to push yourself when you don’t have the energy to create anything. I’ve found some of my best ideas come when I take the pressure off and give myself time and space to rest and do nothing. 

Navigating the world as an Autistic person is exhausting and it’s important to take time to care for yourself where you can. Setting aside time to explore your own creativity in what form is comfortable for you can be a lovely addition to any Autistic self-care practice. Even if it’s just giving yourself the space to scribble on a piece of paper. 

Danni Stewart is a creative producer and artist working on Gadigal Land. Their work spans podcasts, performance, sound art and the written word. Danni has previously explored their Autistic identity through their 2023 audio artwork, ‘But I’m A Virgo’ published by Transom. And their essay ‘Autistic Temporalities and Adventures in Crip Time’ which was recently published in ‘Someone Like Me’ a new anthology of Autistic writing from UQP.