No cry for help is loud enough!

Lotus Links are a Leeds based volunteer led, peer support group for parents and carers of Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND), neurodivergent or disabled children who experience violent or anxiety led distressed behaviour. Exploring and expressing deeply personal and emotive shared experiences of neurodivergence in conflict with institutional processes and thinking. This work involves considerable personal investment, discussing, exploring and finding different ways to express what is often left unsaid in public spaces and finding a way to communicate this through art.

This work comes from a desire to tell stories in response to what has happened in the past and what is happening right now in people's lives. It explores emotive lived experience through ideas of activism, performance, poetry and photography with a clear intention to be a provocation, and to open up a debate around the hierarchy and relationships between institutions and their policies and the individual. Highlighting the impact on parents, carers and their children who find themselves living in conflict with the normative and ableism of our world all around them.

The exhibition takes place in Central Court accompanied by a digital slide show in Artspace.

In addition to the exhibition, an event will take place on Saturday 5 December. Join Benedict, Briony and members of Lotus Links from 1.00pm-4.00pm for a panel discussion and a tour around the exhibition. Meet at 1.00pm in the Henry Moore Lecture Theatre conference room, Leeds Art Gallery. This exhibition and event is free.