Work in progress pop-up installation by artist Rachel Eleanor Brook
Newcastle university Fine Art Department, TIC Space, 18- 20 November 2026
Suggesture is a work in progress pop-up installation by artist Rachel Eleanor Brook, exploring pleasure and autistic stimming through self-commodification, self-platforming, self-objectification and the relationship between the artist, the artwork and its audience.
The work occupies a playful sweet spot between self-objectification and subtle, playful eroticism. I am interested in bringing together the visual and material languages of sensuality, using muted tones, textures and tactile elements to create an environment that invites curiosity, touch and sensory engagement. There is a deliberate interplay between the invitation to look and the invitation to touch, between being presented as an object and actively controlling how that object is encountered. The work draws on queerness, sensuality and positive eroticism, without relying on explicitness. Instead, I am interested in the pleasure of suggestion, the possibility of something being implied rather than declared, and the ways in which an audience might find their own points of connection through looking, touching and interacting. The material and aesthetic qualities of the installation engage pleasurable autistic sensory engagement, stimming and aesthetic joy.
Through an immersive installation, I am interested in the act of deliberately positioning parts of myself as an object for observation, inviting an audience to look, engage, touch and participate. However, this invitation comes with a particular tension: while I am making myself available to be observed and objectified, I retain agency, power and control over the conditions of that encounter. The work cannot exist without an audience, but the audience cannot fully participate without interacting. They are not simply observers but active participants, invited into the act of objectification itself. I am interested in what happens when the relationship between performer and audience becomes less fixed, and when the act of looking becomes an active, embodied and reciprocal experience.
The name Suggesture, a portmanteau combining the words suggest and gesture, is a pleaurable word-stim of suggest, gesture invoking the Latin suggestus, which carries the dual meanings of a raised or elevated place, such as a platform or stage, and an indication or communication. I am interested in the crossover between these meanings and the connections between suggesting, staging and platforming: the act of bringing an idea forward, giving it space and making it visible. I find excitement in the way these original meanings intersect with contemporary language, opening up possibilities for thinking about communication as something that can be both proposed and physically enacted. There is also a particular pleasure that I find, as an artist and as an autistic person, in word-stimming: the joy, and sometimes even titillation, of the sensory experience of language itself. Certain words have an audio and verbal quality that invites repetition, where the sound, rhythm and physical sensation of saying them become pleasurable in their own right. Suggest, gesture, suggestion, Suggesture.
The work is informed and inspired by Pleasure Activism and theoretical concepts of neuroqueerness, particularly in the ways that pleasure, sensory experience and embodied expression can challenge normative expectations. I am interested in aesthetics as a source of pleasure in its own right: aesthetic joy, aesthetic pleasure and the sensory satisfaction of engaging with materials, textures, sounds and visual relationships. For me, stimming is not simply a means of regulation or a response to sensory experience but can also be an active source of pleasure, curiosity and joy. This is particularly important within my practice as a neuroqueer textile disruptor, where tactile encounters and sensory interventions offer possibilities for communication and connection beyond conventional forms of language. Suggesture brings these interests together through an installation that is intended to be experienced as much as observed, where the audience is invited to engage with the work on their own sensory terms.
Suggesture forms part of a wider developing body of work and research centred around Notes on Stimming and the Archive of Stims. Notes on Stimming takes inspiration from Susan Sontag’s Notes on Camp, and is an organic, evolving work in progress that records and reflects upon my own pleasurable stims. Drawing on Sontag’s approach to collecting observations, associations and ideas, I am developing a personal record of the sensory, aesthetic and sometimes unexpected pleasures of stimming. Alongside this, the Archive of Stims is an ongoing open survey inviting other autistic and neurodivergent people who find pleasure in stimming to contribute their own experiences and record their individual stims. Together, these projects form the beginning of a wider artistic research project, bringing personal experience into conversation with shared knowledge and collective participation. I am interested in creating an expanding archive of sensory pleasure that recognises the diversity of neurodivergent experience, while making space for the particularities, idiosyncrasies and unexpected joys of individual stims.
