Elinor Rowlands (b. Luxembourg) is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher whose practice operates at the intersection of immersive arts, experimental sound, expanded cinema, and autistic perception. Her work investigates the relational architectures of sensation, memory, and environment, examining how autistic and disabled perceptual frameworks generate novel aesthetic, ecological, and temporal structures. Her practice spans movement, video-audio, multiscreen installations of varying scales, painting, expanded cinema, dance, land-based ecologies, and interactive and immersive technologies, foregrounding the disabled and neurodivergent body as a site of knowledge, perception, and creative exploration.
Within her practice, Rowlands rigorously explores the Autistic Sensorium, stimming as artistic methodology, and biodivergent poetics. Her works are frequently described as excessive, dense, loud, and multi-layered — immersive soundscapes, overlapping visuals, and recursive temporalities that defy conventional expectations of spectatorship, performance, or representation.
She invites audiences into sensation itself rather than onto a stage or into a narrative. Rhythm, gesture, tactile engagement, and layered sensory intensity foreground relationality and affective attunement, cultivating modes of perception that exist beyond linear, representational, or orderly frameworks. In her work, chaos is method, overload is invitation, and excess becomes a pathway to attune, relate, and inhabit an autistic way of sensing the world.
Rowlands’ projects often function as sensorial environments or contemporary rituals, producing non-linear, participatory experiences such as The Tarot Walk and Retelling of the Wild Woods. These works draw on folk histories, urban folklore, gothic aesthetics, and ritualistic practices to create spaces in which memory, sensation, and environment circulate freely, allowing audiences to inhabit otherworldly, liminal thresholds. Drawing on her lived experiences of autism, ADHD, synesthesia, and disability, Rowlands’ practice emphasises the creative, ecological, and relational potential of sensory perception.
An integral component of her work is experimental music and sound art, produced under her own name, and in collaboration with artists including Ben McElroy, Ben Lunn, and Valeria Radchenko. With Radchenko, she creates experimental sound for natural landscapes, producing immersive, urban-folklore-inspired environments; a kind of woodland nightclub built from rhythm, texture, and sonic layering. She works site-specifically, drawing on the acoustic and atmospheric qualities of environments, and attuning to how the body responds to space; compositions often emerge from the subtle ways breath and movement shift with temperament and place. She has been commissioned to make sound trails and soundscapes for Mersea Island, an island being slowly reclaimed by the sea, for the project The Deepenings (2023), working live, site-specifically, or within immersive environments. Her compositions, which appear on NMC Recordings’ Letting the Light In (Disabled Composers) and on vinyl releases with Ben McElroy, as well as broadcast on BBC Sounds, explore microtonal layering, sonic recursion, and the embodied experience of rhythm, situating her practice within radical sound research, immersive performance, and avant-garde composition.
Rowlands’ work also dwells in grief, darkness, and the liminal “inbetweeny” space identified by Michelle Yergeau (2018) in neuroqueering. Rowlands identifies this space as the “otherworld” a space of dissociation and connection at the same time. This is a space where memory, loss, and affective sedimentation co-exist with curiosity, awe, and relational attunement. Within this threshold, her practice foregrounds embodied experience and sensation as tools for navigating complex histories, trauma, and ecological resonance. Here, stimming, sound, movement, and sensory layering become methods to dwell within intensity, to translate affect into perceptual and artistic practice, and to explore worlds beyond neurotypical assumptions of order and linearity.
Rowlands has exhibited and performed extensively across institutional, gallery, and digital contexts, including BEAF & Co., the British Council, the Canal and River Trust, LADA, Tate Modern, and the European Investment Bank. Her installations combine sonic, visual, and tactile elements to create phantasmagorical, immersive environments often compared to the psychological landscapes of Leonora Carrington.
Currently a Fine Art practice-based PhD candidate at Nottingham Trent University (ARC) until July 2026, Rowlands’ research develops Biodivergent Poetics, a framework that positions autistic perception as a creative, ecological, and world-making methodology. Her practice and research collectively interrogate neurotypical, linear, and representational frameworks, affirming autistic authority, relational attunement, and embodied knowledge as generative modes of contemporary art-making.
