I'm Ben
Curiosity, colour, novelty, authenticity… these are the kids on my street that keep knocking and asking if I want to come out to play. It’s a good job they do, because sometimes the world is too hard and I have too many tendernesses and rages and whelms.
I am a creative responder. I see, or feel something and I want to respond, sometimes to understand, sometimes to help, often because it’s pulling me in a way that feels right. I do that through some form of creative output… be it visual, sculptural, theatrical, musical, writing, community projects… whatever it takes to explore and create something that engages and inspires me, so I can share that excitement with others and let that good feeling multiply outwards.
I have often pictured myself as running up to others excitedly with handfuls of gems… loook, look how good this is, enjoy it with me.
If you met me through any one of these things, you might think that’s what I do. We all carry cultural and personal scripts for artists, for academics, for drag performers, even for senior public library managers administering cultural funds in local government. For anyone, those shorthands are reductive at best, stereotyping at worst. They deny whole areas of the terrain of the person they’re trying to describe. People are continents. I was born to dance and wriggle and argue my way out of every box anyone has ever shown me. Schrödinger’s autistic, trans, cat. But I love dogs too.
I have been wondering about the meaning of life, God and everything else in the broad category of ‘woo’ for my whole life. It was very obvious to me as a child that I was seeing and experiencing something of a miraculous world that most of the adults and some of the other kids around me weren’t picking up on. Of course as I grew I lost that easy access to it. I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to get back to what I already knew, with help from traditions and teachers who remembered what the culture around me had forgotten. I try to look deeply, I try to listen deeply, and I try to do both with love. I have just found it to be a nicer way to live. I say try because it’s a continual practice and I am as many parts spiritual grinch as I am fairy-godfather.
Part of that practice is expressed through my Interfaith ministry, which you can read more about here.
And so I often make things as a response to what I want to see in the world and currently don’t. I try to make things that meet people the way I wanted to be met, or to support them, ennoble them, or offer them the reminder of the wonder of their own authenticity. It’s liberatory, reforming work. Sometimes it feels like it’s just my nature and other times it’s like a young part of me really wants to make the world less shit in the ways I have found it to be shit. Everything belongs.
Consent, congruence, and integrity are my other most treasured playmates.
An autism assessment in 2023, together with my background in performance and storytelling for young folk, led to the creation of Teddy Play. I made the kind of exciting, interactive, autism-from-the-ground-up activity I would have liked to participate in as a child. One that takes everyone’s responses, opinions and ideas seriously in the moment and that invites everyone’s imagination to combine, performers and audience alike, to make the play together.
How Teddy Play works
With small groups we help Benji, my childhood teddy, find the missing key to his imagination by going back through the day and all his activities to see where he might have left it. We journey to his imaginary worlds by visiting the three globes on a giant glowing disc in turn, following the shape of his day. The first is marble world, full of twinkling lights, every kind, size and shape of marble, tubes, melted marbles, even the inside looks like we have peered inside a glittering ball. Then we visit marshmallow world, filled with stuffies, soft silicone toys, tiny flasks of marshmallow tea. Sometimes we stop here for a little lie down and the Everything Belongs song. Next, we ask the spirits of the elements to help us open up nature world, which has an exciting glowing lid of handmade resin mushrooms that change colour in response to our efforts. Inside we find a lake full of treasures and more. Throughout there is plenty of room for conversation about our sensory preferences and the accommodations that would support us. We work together and sing the Remember, remember, we’re in this together song to remind us of our ability to help each other.
Teddy Play was created with support from the Hawk’s Well Theatre, Sligo. It has its own dedicated page with social story and more here.
Teddy Play has just concluded a small Irish tour (early 2026). I am also currently wrapping up my residency with the Irish Hospice Foundation, where I did research and writing on the intersection between play, imagination, spirituality, and their role in healthy engagement with emotions. I also looked at indigenous Irish spirituality through the lens of Shamanic practice, and at the different routes Christianity took into Ireland, particularly the tradition of the desert fathers. That’s still a thread I am actively pulling on.
My current focus is on developing my visual art practice, following delicious threads from the stained glass work of Harry Clarke, through manga and anime, comic illustration and mixed media sculpture.
As with most things in my life, this is a slow, iterative process. My personal motto is that a kind life is made from kind decisions, and for my particular blend of sensitive autistic nervous system and trauma history, this means resting and respecting my limits.
If something here resonates, I’d love to hear from you.
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For more on Spiritual Accompaniment specifically, my FAQs page has further information you might find useful, amusing or soothing.
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