My name is Kim Percy and I'm an artist and designer and I work as a sessional lecturer here at Federation University.

My PhD is called Visualizing the Invisible and it is investigating dyslexia through the lens of visual art. I've been researching dyslexia, what are the correlations between dyslexia and visual art and how that may affect myself.

I learned a lot about processing my childhood and I realised what I would consider my strengths have come through or attributes to dyslexia. That was a revelation for me. but it also explained a lot about who I am, the decisions I've made throughout life and how I have processed various parts of my life. 

As I was researching, I came across various topics that I wanted to explore. Each of those topics ended up being a chapter in my thesis. 

For example, there's a work behind me which is in water and it's two figures holding each other and it's called the oscillation of disclosure.

With that work I was exploring the notion of do I disclose being dyslexic? What does that look like in terms of my career? 

If we're looking at dyslexia being about between 10 to 20% of the population, in creative arts, we're looking at between 30 to 75% of people. And so there's a lot of people that are not speaking up and disclosing.

There's another artwork looking at the challenge of language. I've got another chapter which looks at masking and looks at the coping strategies around hiding.

Every aspect of my thesis, I then created a series of work that responded to that. 

When I see the work here in one body of work as an exhibition, I feel very privileged to be able to create this work, and I feel proud that I've created these bodies of work which has opened up so many conversations with people.

They're able to explore or explain or reveal parts of their own experience with either dyslexia or other neural divergence like ADHD or autism.

And I think that my artwork actually opens up those conversations.