How can visual arts be a form of communication and expression for people with dyslexia?

The comic strips are a creative response to five weekly workshops with four participants who have dyslexia and who met to collaborate on a storytelling project using imagery rather than depending on the written word. As the workshops progressed, the tussle between using and avoiding text was surprising.

I intended the workshops to use multi-dimensional forms of communication to provide creative freedom for each participant to confidently celebrate how they view the world as someone with dyslexia. When designing the workshops, I assumed that people with dyslexia do not enjoy or ‘need’ text to communicate if they are given the artistic freedom to tell narratives without it.  Despite the autonomy the workshops provided, as they progressed the participants chose to include text to emphasise and clarify what each of their images was saying.

The comic strips document findings from each workshop. The comic strip style parallels the work created in the workshops. The first comic strip has minimal text to mirror the text the participants used in their work in the first workshop. As the comic strips progress, more writing is introduced. As each project continued, the confidence of each of the participants grew in relationship to the use of text.

The comic strips are a celebration of the way people with dyslexia, including myself, can communicate when given the creative freedom to use text and images how they want and need.