Stimulation Series

Stimulation began long before it had a name. Long before autism or ADHD were part of the vocabulary through which Sana Shah understood herself. It began simply with the way she experienced the world.

Growing up, she learnt to move through life by adapting, watching, absorbing, performing, controlling, masking, fixating. Different phases required different versions of her. Outwardly, she functioned with precision; inwardly, the world could be extraordinarily loud. Too much information, too much feeling, too much noticing, followed by an equally powerful need to retreat into repetition, movement, obsession or stillness.

Read moreRead less

Motherhood shifted the lens. As she learnt the rhythms of her children, their overwhelm, their stims, their need for control and their moments of complete release, recognition quietly surfaced.

Before her own diagnosis, she was already reading her life differently. Behaviours rearranged themselves. Memories took on new meaning. Even parts of her painting practice, repetition, obsessive mark-making, recurring figures, movement, control and disruption began to reveal their origins.

Stimulation comes from that re-reading.

The works are small, almost fragmentary: flashes of thought, bodily sensations, fixations and emotional states. Some are controlled; others refuse control. They move between contemplation and disquiet, repetition and interruption, stillness and excess. Rather than illustrating a diagnosis, the paintings attempt to show what the experience feels like from the inside.

There is humour in that recognition too, the quiet absurdity of discovering that the chaos had a vocabulary all along.

So Stimulation is not a series about becoming neurodivergent. It is about finally meeting the person who had been there the whole time, through childhood, adulthood, motherhood, art, masking, obsession, overstimulation and reinvention.

Same brain. New subtitles. or, in considerably less clinical terms: neurospicy.