Making Time

Reminder: we have a website now! It's gorgeous and purple and green and has a cool working clock ⏰ On there you will find more information about us and what we do, a form to join our mailing list, and some handy resources. Our amazing designer @sh built it for us, and we created this rather fetching laptop image to showcase it :)) Find it at makingtime.online - the link is also in our bio of course xx - Image description: a purple digital, slightly wonky line drawing of a laptop, on a light purple background, with a visualisation of the Making Time website on the screen. The clock logo is in the top left corner of the screen, there are six purple bubbles which say Mailing List, About, Resources, Workshops, Access Info and Media, and a short blurb in the bottom left corner that reads: Making Time is a virtual group for neurodivergent artists, writers and researchers to do our own things together apart.

We're pleased that our Writing Beyond Language workshop with @ashokdmistry this Wednesday has had so many bookings! There are still a few spaces left, so click through via the link in our bio for some more info, and to secure a spot. The workshop will take place on Zoom this Weds 22 April, 7pm BST. We will send joining instructions via email in advance, so please check your spam folder. This workshop is made possible with the support of an National Lottery Arts Council England Project Grant, and Artist Development Support from Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art. -------------- Image description: a colour photo of a man with brown skin and greying hair, and a yellow t-shirt, standing in front of a painting with bold green, blue and red strokes on a black-grey background. he is looking up at something out of frame and smiling openly

Book your spot via the link in our bio! Free upcoming artist-led workshops on zoom. Collectivising Rejection with Liza Prins and Alina Lupu Mon 13 April - 7pm Writing Beyond Language with Ashokkumar Mistry Weds 22 April - 7pm Mindful Drawing with Sofia Barton Mon 27 April - 7pm More details on our website 🌞 Thanks to @sh for our branding!

What's Making Time you ask? Well let us explain... Video description: Screen recording of a zoom meeting. Jo and Grace are in separate frames. There is a timer that appears in Jo’s frame, counting down from three minutes. Jo is a white nonbinary person with short reddish hair wearing a black shirt and clear framed glasses. Grace is a white woman with curly brown hair, wearing dark framed glasses and a deep purple t-shirt. The beginning few seconds of the video is a preview cut from the end in a teaser style, where Jo and Grace are excitedly talking over one another.

We're pleased to be hosting a workshop with the wonderful @sofiabartonart at the end of April, the last in our current season funded by @aceagrams and @balticgateshead . Sofia Barton is a multidisciplinary artist based in the North East of England whose practice is significantly shaped by her dual Pakistani and Indian heritage. Her work is an ongoing exploration of hybrid identities, delving into cultural artefacts, hidden histories, and South Asian folklore, exploring the interconnections between diverse cultures and their environments. In this workshop Sofia will lead us in mindful drawing to explore themes of grounding, collaging, and connections to nature. You are invited to scout for "analog nature" within your home or gather a few fallen leaves/flowers from outdoors. Seek out a curated collection of found objects that carry the spirit of the wild: old magazines featuring sprawling landscapes, vintage postcards of distant horizons, or even used bus tickets and packaging in grounding earth tones like ochre, slate, and moss. Look for the fibrous grit of cardboard or the weathered patina of old paper that mimics the organic textures of the elements. Along with these scavenged treasures, please bring a few sheets of paper, some tape, and your favourite pen or pencil as we prepare to weave these fragments into a new, hand crafted landscape. Book your free ticket via the link in the Making Time bio! The workshop takes place on zoom, please email to let us know if there's anything we can do to make it easier for you to attend: [email protected] Image courtesy of the artist, taken at a previous workshop. Image description: colour photo of a collaged artwork made with torn images of plants and abstracted nature tones and patterns. two white hands at the left side of the frame are poised with a glue stick ready to continue. the artwork lays on a table-top covered with other pieces of paper torn from magazines, and a bright yellow glasses case nestled among them. two purple circles are overlaid on top containing the title 'Mindful Drawing with Sofia Barton' and 'Mon 27 April 2026, 7-9pm online' in green text on top.

Booking is now open for our workshop led by our long-time member @ashokdmistry In this workshop Ashokkumar (Ashok) will lead us in writing beyond language which is to say, writing outside the rules of language. This stems from Ashok's Aphantasia which means he finds it difficult (almost impossible) to picture things in his mind's eye. He has come to realise this may be why he often begins artistic projects with writing as a starting point, rather than design. Ashok will lead a few of the exercises he uses including forming ideas around a core word or image. Participants will need some paper and something to write/ draw with. In order to make the workshop accessible, participants who don’t want to write can also use pictures if they wish. The workshop will take place on zoom, book via the link on the Making Time profile, and please email to let us know if there's anything we can do to make it easier for you to attend: [email protected] Ashokkumar (Ashok) Mistry is a multidisciplinary artist, writer and curator working in the UK and internationally. Ashokkumar didn’t identify as neurodivergent until he was in his 40s, and it was a seminal moment for his artistic practice. Since then, he has been focused on researching and writing about disability and neurodiversity. - This work was made possible with a National Lottery Project Grant from Arts Council England, and Artist Development Support from Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art. @aceagrams @balticgateshead - Artwork in the poster courtesy of the artist. Image description: a close up photo of an expressive painting in red, blue and orange tones, with text light markings over the top, seemingly scratched into the paint as they appear in a light red-orange tone. the painting is overlaid with Making Time graphics including their clock-like logo, and three purple circles with a pixelated edge, with the title of the workshop, the name of the artist, and the time and date in green text over the top of them.

Our next workshop!! Join us on zoom for Collectivising Rejection with Alina Lupu and Liza Prins. The fifth in a series of peer support + creative workshops hosted by Making Time and invited artists, for anyone who is (or may be) neurodivergent. This workshop will focus on how to reframe the individualisation of rejection we all experience as artists, and instead build solidarity and resilience collectively. Building on techniques from Theatre of the Oppressed, Alina and Liza will guide (aspirational) art workers through a process of visualising their rejections, mapping them onto those of peers, tracing shared patterns and structural conditions, and eventually producing a zine with practical prompts to help reject individualisation of rejection and keep a collective revolutionary horizon in view. Rejection sensitivity and the instability of fragmented work can be especially challenging for (neurodivergent) art workers. This workshop aims to initiate a collectively authored guide to coping steeped in solidarity and mutual support, without allowing those coping strategies to become forms of adaptation to the very systems that continue to harm us and our communities. Let's fan some flames of discontent. Book your free place on eventrbrite - the link is in the Making Time bio. The workshop takes place on zoom, please email to let us know if there's anything we can do to make it easier for you to attend: [email protected] Image is by Marie Ilse Bourlanges: Liza Prins Open Rehearsal of Flax baby! Flax!, 2024. Making Time logo and graphics are by @sh Image description: six people sit informally on varied chairs around a conservatory-style room made of glass windows, with lush greenery outside. overlaid on top are five round purple graphics with bright green text on top with the name of the event and hosts, the date and time, plus a block of text that reads 'Free workshop for neurodivergent (aspirational) art workers. Book your ticket on eventbrite to join' and an arrow pointing right. The Making Time logo is bottom left, it is a simplified clock face in purple with white hands.

We are very pleased to announce that we have a brand new shiny website!! Courtesy of @sh who came on board to help us update our branding, and make a gorgeous and accessible web presence for Making Time. He's kept the mild-glitch, eurotrash meets play school aesthetic while ensuring it's as readable and comprehensive as possible for all visitors. To keep us right the logo even has animated clock hands!! 🙏 Thanks for making our dreams come true, Rush. Visit the site at makingtime.online (the link is clickable on our profile page) and let us know what you think. - This work was made possible with a National Lottery Project Grant from Arts Council England, and Artist Development Support from Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art. @aceagrams @balticgateshead - Image description: Three versions of the new Making Time logo in different colourways. The first is a white pixelated circle, with bright green clock hands pointing to 10am, on a purple background with green letters spelling Making Time around the edge, appearing to slightly fall out of alignment near the bottom of the frame. The second is in monochrome, light purple letters and clock on a darker purple background and clock hands, and the third version is the inverse of that.

Join us on Zoom this Wednesday evening for a workshop with @kasrajalilipour Kasra is leading a writing focused workshop on dream mapping, a process that combines creative writing and visual aids to process ideas and thoughts. It’s also a great tool for diminishing the fear of the blank page! Kasra will be bringing in references from their own practice, and invites attendees to do the same. Full details and booking via the link in our bio! Made possible with support from Arts Council England and Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art - Still from Forged Yearnings Kasra Jalilipour 8minutes 2025 UK "In Forged Yearnings, 19th century photographs of Iranian Qajar women lie amongst the plants and sculptures of Derek Jarman’s garden, creating surreal scenarios of women from the past in a foreign land. These photographs are some of the only visual historical evidence of a primarily homosocial country which afforded women many spaces of togetherness. They have been kept in many western archives and have become a subject of fascination for the western gaze, as well as the queer Iranian diaspora, often yearning to find traces of queerness in their history. The film questions the concept of ‘queering the past’, and issues that arise when looking for ourselves in history." Image description: a colour photograph of a paper cut-out of an old photograph of two women printed in monochrome, both women are seated and looking down, one is playing a stringed musical instrument. the cut-out is nestled in a gravelled surface with green and yellow plant fronds growing up around it.

Holding Time: Building a Memory Constellation with @evan_ife 🐚 Weds 11 March, 2026 7-9pm UK time On Zoom One in a series of peer support + creative workshops hosted by Making Time and invited artists, for anyone who is (or may be) neurodivergent. This workshop will focus on personal collections that hold stories, and how they can be anchors for meaning-making and creative practice. Evan Ifekoya is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice mirrors their role as a spiritual practitioner, perceiving art as a platform for redistributing and renegotiating resources, challenging implicit rules and hierarchies in public and social spaces. The session will be held on Zoom. Book a free ticket via the link in our bio, and we will email you joining instructions ahead of the event. The workshop will last two hours with a comfort break in the middle. Evan Ifekoya will host, with support from Grace and Jo (who run Making Time). Photo: Evan Ifekoya - Calabash, Kettlebell and Cascarilla, 2024 Image description: colour photo taken from above, of a brightly patterned fabric/tablecloth in orange, black and yellow tones, with a photo album lain open at a photo of Evan training on a beach with blue sky and palm trees behind. An Abalone Shell is next to the album, filled with small white items that look like plaster casts of smaller shells. The making time logo appears in one corner, green text around a hand-drawn clock face. Text appears in black on a yellow background which lists the name of the workshop and the time and date. - Made possible with funding from @aceagrams and @balticgateshead

You can now book for our next workshop with the amazing @kasrajalilipour ! Kasra is leading a writing focused workshop on dream mapping, a process that combines creative writing and visual aids to process ideas and thoughts. It’s also a great tool for diminishing the fear of the blank page! Kasra will be bringing in references from their own practice, and invites attendees to do the same. This session is one in a series of peer support + creative workshops hosted by Making Time and invited artists, for anyone who is (or may be) neurodivergent. The workshop will be held on Zoom. Book your free ticket via the link in our bio. We will email you a link to join ahead of the event. The workshop will last two hours with a comfort break. If you have any access requirements you'd like to flag with us, please email [email protected] - Kasra Jalilipour is an Iranian artist, and writer, based in the UK. Their interdisciplinary practice takes on the forms of sculpture, installation, moving image, text, and live performance. Through a positive obsession with histories of otherness they use methods of speculation to rewrite and reshape lost histories. The visual language in their works is often inspired by Imageries and texts from cultural and religious practices in the middle-east and Europe. Photo by Connor Pope Image description: A colour photo of a person with brown skin, short black hair and bleached eyebrows, standing against a textured blue wall, wearing a chunky silver chain around their neck, a leather waistcoat and white vest. They have a green tendril-like tattoo on the arm nearest the camera, and they are looking directly into the lens. Text and graphics appear around the person, deep blue text reads 'Dream Mapping Workshop with Kasra Jalilipour, Wednesday 4 March 7pm Uk time on Zoom'. A blue-turquoise shape with a jagged outline has the phrase 'book a free ticket' imposed on top. The Making Time logo is in one corner, flourescent green text around a white circle, with hand-drawn lines that resemble the hands of a clock pointing to 10 o' clock. -- Made possible with funding from @aceagrams and @balticgateshead

We have emailed the joining link for tonight's event out to attendees, check your spam folder and let us know if you still can't find it! We've made the decision not to record the event, as we want people attending to feel comfortable sharing and asking questions with Abby and the group. But we are happy to share the event materials with anyone who can't attend. If you'd like to arrange an alternate time to work through the spreadsheet with a like-minded community, you can join our discord where members have the chance to propose dates and times of co-working or body doubling sessions, and these can even be hosted within discord itself. Email us if you'd like to receive the materials after the event, or an invite to join our discord server: [email protected] - Discord icon by Icons8 Image description: the discord logo appears in blue-purple, on top of a light green background. the logo is a rectangle with curved sides, and attena-like protuberances from each corner, with two circular cut-outs in the centre. it resembles an insect's face, or some kind of helmet.