A woman stands in front of a projected image of a face

Temporal Echoes, Paige Lee Miller, 2024 MA Fashion Photography, London College of Fashion, UAL

University of the Arts London

UAL Showcase Collections

Disabling Barriers

Spiral bound, red cover with bold yellow text reading; Burnout Season! A daily planner, navigating neurodivergent burnout. 

Addressing neurodivergent burnout and internalised ableism in young adults, Burnout Season! questions the pathology paradigm that divides the spectrum of human cognitive function.&quot;It&#39;s hard to remember everything that keeps you well all the time in a world that is designed for and praises high productivity and speed – things that aren&#39;t the best way of working. These serve as beautiful reminders. Concept, form and aesthetics make this a great project.&quot;– Jo Verrent, Director at Unlimited

Burnout Season!

a man and a woman sitting on a deck. the man is holding a mask and the woman is holding the mans leg.

Masquerade sheds light on the multifaceted roles masks play, aiding in camouflaging and navigating the intricate terrain of a neurotypical world, as well as mirroring the external expectations imposed on those on the autism spectrum by society.&quot;I love the humour in Masquerade and the lightness of touch. It&#39;s immediately understandable. Anybody could look at that and get a sense of what the graduate is trying to convey.&quot;– Jo Verrent, Director at Unlimited

Masquerade

An image of a poster that says 'This Is How I Read With Dyslexia' fly posted onto a wall.

Help Others Understand Dyslexia aims to recreate the frustrations of reading with dyslexia using typography.&quot;This project communicates an experience that’s quite difficult to convey in a really beautiful way. Often when we design public awareness campaigns, we make things really complicated and try to say too many things. This doesn’t do that. It’s succinct and has a very clear concept.&quot;– Jo Verrent, Director at Unlimited

Help Others Understand Dyslexia

Hand sketch of Coram's Field in axonometric view

ADHD in the City investigates the habitual exclusion of ADHD people within the context of London’s ‘accessible’ public spaces – exploring current deficiencies of neurodivergent spatial inclusivity.&quot;I love the breadth of thought behind this and the breathtaking ambition of looking at a whole city. We&#39;re going to have to think at that kind of size and scale to make a difference. Even just as an illustration, it’s clear and nicely put together, so I thought it was beautiful from a design perspective as well.&quot;– Jo Verrent, Director at Unlimited

ADHD in the City

Informed by the graduate&#39;s experience with ADHD, Temporal Echoes is a photography project exploring subjective temporality and the way memories repeatedly re-experience (and therefore re-structure) themselves in the mind.&quot;I love projects that come from lived experience, because they give me insight into somebody else’s world. Quite often there is an assumption that if you’re disabled, you understand everybody else’s impairment, which of course is not true. We only know our own experience, so to be able to see through the eyes of someone else is wonderful.I have never seen the stories Temporal Echoes tells, told in this before. A unique, project that taught me so much about the individual’s view on the world. The photographs are just beautiful. I love how the work speaks for itself.&quot;– Jo Verrent, Director at Unlimited

Temporal Echoes

 Materiality is crucial in this project to provide an immersive reading experience. Three types of paper represent the phases of verbal communication.

MullenLowe NOVA Awards 2024

Graduate Awards 2024

Unsteady Ground is a project about ataxia, a neurological disorder that impairs coordination of voluntary movements. It tells the story of the graduate’s dad&#39;s progressive experience with the disorder, highlighting his gradual loss of verbal communication.&quot;This project is subtle and generous in its understanding of the experience of others. You can see within the work the love, care and respect for the artist’s parent, or people who have this condition. It’s fascinating and I spent a lot of time just looking at the spreads. It felt very relaxing, and I learned a little bit more every time I looked.&quot;– Jo Verrent, Director at Unlimited

Unsteady Ground

Sanatorium in a Boathouse Docklands is an architecture project which aims to support people suffering from ill mental health such as depression, anxiety and extreme stress and needing a place to heal and disconnect from reality by utilising NHS recommendations.&quot;I&#39;ve read and written many access assessments of buildings, but I’ve never seen an assessment that considers how light works within a space. It’s great that somebody is thinking so deeply not only about the materials or sights, but also about sunlight. The renders look beautiful. I want to go and spend time there.I particularly like the courtyard with the brick walls and the shaft of light that comes through. You can imagine that spotlight moving around over time.&quot;– Jo Verrent, Director at Unlimited

Sanatorium in the Boathouse Docklands

My skin is so red, it makes me so depressed.

Red Skin is a photography series of therapeutic self-portraits that centre around the artist’s experience with skin allergies. &quot;It&#39;s not impairment Olympics, but there are some impairments that often trigger more of a sympathetic or a pitiful response from the public. Any kind of skin disfigurement steps into that territory, and this was a complete rejection of that. It&#39;s saying, ‘Don&#39;t look at me out of pity, look at me because this is part of who I am’. This is beauty redefined.The photographs themselves are high quality, intriguing and immediately understandable, without missing depth. They’re not simplistic. It&#39;s just a beautiful project. This artist is definitely one to watch.&quot;– Jo Verrent, Director at Unlimited

Red Skin

This work is a chair with legs and joins made from wood. The bottom and back panels are made from clear resin encasing human hair.

Pedigrees of Madness explores “nature versus nurture” in relation to mental health disorders.&quot;This project considers our DNA. We can retell stories, we can reframe things. But there is a genetic level to who we are. I have an auto-immune disorder, so I take medication. That can&#39;t alter my DNA, though it can alter its impacts. The objects look beautiful too – you couldn&#39;t go into a space that had something like that and not have a conversation. It also got me thinking about things like facial reconstruction surgery or breast enlargements or all the ways in which we play with ourselves, and with who we are at a visceral, embodied level.&quot;– Jo Verrent, Director at Unlimited

Pedigrees of Madness

2 images one with a girl holding flowers and second one with a girl becoming a flower

PCOS and its effects on women focuses on the graduate’s personal journey with PCOS. It uses a combination of images, photos, and scans to highlight the different symptoms and experiences associated with PCOS.&quot;These are stunningly beautiful, complex, interesting images that I wanted to get lost in. I wanted to understand the details. You&#39;re drawn to their beauty and then you see the tears and the rips, the things that are broken down and the materials used, and it starts to tell you this story of the negative effects of a particular condition. The quality of the artwork serves as a conversation starter.&quot;– Jo Verrent, Director at Unlimited

PCOS and its effects on women

A collection of objects including a grass tapestry, wooden handrail, two oil paintings and wooden bowls. A white, non-binary person stands behind.

Imperfect Amendments is a collection of interviews, essays, live projects, and a speculative example at Leeds Art Gallery demonstrating how retrofit strategies are improved through critical access theory. Together, they show how essential queer, disabled, and neurodiverse people’s experience and ingenuity is for rethinking architectural design as sustainable and equitable.&quot;I like the fact that this is based on somewhere incredibly specific. They drilled down into the details of what would need to change within a space to make it inclusive. The title is great, too. Even things that change are always going to be imperfect as there&#39;s always going to be the next evolution of thought.It’s useful to recognise and highlight how we can all take up space in public buildings, particularly people who are usually marginalised.&quot;– Jo Verrent, Director at Unlimited

Imperfect Amendments

I utilized illustration to record the content of my interviews with women around me about menstrual cramps.

Invisible Pain consists of a small booklet and sculptures centred around &quot;dysmenorrhea&quot;, a gynecological disease that is close to the graduate’s life.&quot;I like the joining of the beautiful graphic illustrations and a subject that is usually taboo. It’s straightforward, there’s no shock or horror. The subject is covered in an incredibly normalised way, just as it should be. It takes the invisible nature of something and visualises it, making it overt. I was particularly drawn to the illustration of the woman looking up and bleeding with a hand on her belly. I just think that&#39;s a beautiful image. It’s not a universal experience, but lots of people with wombs who have this experience would recognise it.&quot;– Jo Verrent, Director at Unlimited

Invisible Pain

EPI.TAPH is a goth fashion collection by a working-class, transgender, autistic young designer.&quot;This project speaks to multiple things and comes from a community that is often misrepresented or stereotyped. It’s a really nuanced portrayal.The detail in some of the work looks exquisite and I wanted to know more about the fabrication, because not only are they aesthetically beautiful as fashion creations, but they are artworks in and of themselves. You could absolutely see the application of this work in many different contexts.&quot;– Jo Verrent, Director at Unlimited

EPI.TAPH

person interacting with a performative piece made out of concrete, aluminium, wood and jesmonite

Objectifying the Unseen is a jewellery collection that explores health anxiety and panic attacks by utilising the concept of Cognitive Defusion to objectify the symptoms the graduate has experienced.&quot;The use of scale here is interesting. We usually perceive jewellery as quite ornate, small things. These are enormous. The full body jewellery of this work says that this can&#39;t be hidden away. They&#39;re bold statements, both in colour, form, size and shape. They dominate the wearer.I assume the models aren&#39;t wearing clothes because there’s nothing that could compete with the jewellery – when you have a panic attack, it takes over. I thought this expressed that very well visually.&quot;– Jo Verrent, Director at Unlimited

Objectifying The Unseen

‘how to survive the institution’ poster. blue and red colouring, with an image of a hearing aid, some medicine and a wheelchair user holding a sign.

Inspired by her experiences as a disabled person negotiating access at university and based on her dissertation, Crip negotiations of inaccessible institutions is a zine that explores ways in which disabled students navigate inaccessibility and ableism at UK universities.&quot;At Unlimited, we want to change the cultural sector, so I’m always excited about projects that look for change. Zines are incredibly useful in getting across quite difficult material in a way that is accessible to a very wide audience. This one is just beautifully crafted – both the elements within it and the form itself. The quality of the material is really interesting.&quot;– Jo Verrent, Director at Unlimited

Crip negotiations of inaccessible institutions

Nine gold glass frames are hung by white hooks.  They contain images of me, a white, blonde woman that are backed with flowers.

It&#39;s Messy and It&#39;s Complicated is an installation work combining sculpture and photography, designed to echo a medical setting. The work also aims to highlight the inaccessibility of the gallery space and explores &#39;Crip Time&#39; through the graduate’s own lived experience.&quot;I love the paradox; the fact that it&#39;s created in the space that they&#39;re critiquing. It’s a piece that really provoked me to think about all the spaces that I operate in and how many of them are working against me.The title is great too: There isn’t one solution that fits everything. There isn’t a simple way out of this. So yes – it’s messy and it’s complicated.&quot;– Jo Verrent, Director at Unlimited