Sam Metz is reframing neurodivergence as relational power

Sam Metz is a sculptor and researcher whose work sits at the intersection of neurodivergence, ecology and embodied practice. Based in Hull, Metz explores stimming, tactility and drawing as radical, non-verbal methodologies. Across sculpture, animation and installation, they propose a shift in perspective: that neurodivergent hypersensitivity is not a deficit to be managed, but a relational mode of listening — one that may offer less extractive, more ecologically attuned ways of being in the world.

Here, Metz discusses porosity, vibration, touch, recognition and the importance of access.

Hi Sam! Tell us who you are and what you do:

I am Sam Metz, I am a sculptor and a researcher living in Hull and doing a PhD at Loughborough University around stimming, tactility and drawing research.

I work with drawing, line animation and sculpture. I create work that engages with the concept of ‘neuroqueering’. My sculptural installations often incorporate both film and animation while exploring body-based responses to ecology. As a neurodivergent artist and curator with sensory processing differences, I make work in non-verbal ways that begin and end in movement and embodied interactions without recourse to traditionally privileged verbal and written forms of communication.

Ecology appears repeatedly in your work, particularly through your engagement with sites like the Humber Estuary. What draws you to ecological spaces?

I think it's less that I am drawn to ecological spaces (although I am!) and more what engaging with ideas around ecological perception allows me to do in terms of placing disability studies within an artistic framework. I'm interested in sculptures' relational qualities and responses to situated environments. For instance a lot of my work has been about ‘porosity’, the idea that the neurodivergent body, a highly sensitised body might be attending to many voices (or stimuli) in the environment like holes in the skin that reach out and return with information. This porosity might create ‘wide listening’ and a kind of listening that could potentially open up to the more than human world. Instead of neurodivergence being a deficit, in this instance it supports a less extractive and less human-centric connection to ecology. 

Neurodivergence has the potential for listening to many inputs rather than just thinking of the environment in terms of what Erin Manning describes as ‘use value’. I am working with current thinking around the more-than-human world to suggest that the pathologizing nature of treating neurodivergence purely as symptoms of overwhelm is limiting. Instead we might in fact consider neurodivergent hypersensitivity as praxis, so that certain kinds of neurodivergent being in the world is necessarily anti-capitalist and anti-extractive because it's more relational.

For me this is important as we see things like the rise of generative AI in the arts, where not enough questions are being raised about the embodied energy in the process and the extractive water usage. As an aside, Hull where I live which is critically labelled a ‘risky city’ in terms of the ongoing climate change and flood risk will be holding reflective sessions around AI led by local curator Lucy Brooke.

I am working with current thinking around the more-than-human world to suggest that the pathologizing nature of treating neurodivergence purely as symptoms of overwhelm is limiting.

How do you think about navigation and human interaction when designing an installation?

I'm really interested in movement and tactility, in my work I'm either extending an invitation to touch or I'm inviting the beholder to consider how movement is linked to the work. I have previously offered a ‘touch library’ in my exhibition created for curator Becky Gee at 87 Gallery in Hull back in 2023. I've also made tactile responses to other artworks such as recent objects made in response to Turner paintings at Harewood House. In my year long residency with Tate St Ives working with great curators Joseph Lyward and Jenny Tipton I got to develop objects with young people considering the mark making and tactile qualities of objects we workshopped together. 

My recent installation in Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo didn't have any invitation to touch, but it showed the links to embodiment through animation within the install. For instance I projected an animation of legs stepping on the back wall and another moving figure directly onto a sculpture. These animations linked directly to the research and subject of the installation which was around timber ponds and movement. I'm always interested in bringing the figurative movement that helped design my sculptural works back into the abstracted modular forms.

Exhibiting your work at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo! That’s really cool. You’ve also exhibited your works at many other institutions all over the UK. Like the Henry Moore Institute…

‘Ciliated sense’ is a development of work I initially made for a play event held by Touretteshero that responded to an archive of disabled people’s positive experience of play. 

I wanted to redevelop it thinking more about the form exploring vibration and feedback through the body as you move it. Haptic vibration is a sense I'm really excited by. I made a large hemispherical plywood modular form and myself and artist Jay Moy put wires under tension through the voids in the form. The work rocks and spins and supports stimming actions, in fact a radio broadcaster described it as a big toy and I'm happy with that. When you move it, washers run along a wire and create interesting vibrations that Jay has made a sound recording of.

Also, shout out to Dukes Makes who have supported most of the work I have made in the last three years, they support with fabrication but they're also inspiring and imaginative in their practice.

Metz's work featured at the Henry Moore Institute

You recently won the Aesthetica Emerging Art Prize, which is an amazing achievement. What does this mean to you? 

I am lucky that a lot of my work up to now has been supported by institutions that are known for, or who specialise in, disability arts. This has meant a great deal for my career and also my advocacy. However, being recognised by Aesthetica, a major and global prize has given me confidence that my work is speaking to more than just disability arts audiences. I think this is important because I need recognition outside the disability community to enact change and conversation around disability in the arts.

This sounds like a really important step in your journey as an artist. Your work is also currently part of a group show in Leeds focused on working class artists. Tell us a little about that:

Being in the group exhibition ‘Uz Uz Us’ curated by Laura Claveria is a welcome departure for me. I have been in group exhibitions that are disability led, but this is the first time I have been in an exhibition focusing both on class and also with other queer artists.

My work included is called glitch and is a sculpture and light piece that I made in collaboration with Daniel Dearing a musician based in Hull. The work with a trailing LED light strip running between two modular spherical plywood forms is a response to ‘unpredictable’ tics from having Tourettes. I am interested in how the combination of sculpture and light pulses allows me to have conversations with time and space about the body and the programmed light sequence has an ‘unpredictable’ glitchy sequence that is redolent of tics for me.

Metz's work featured in [Uz, Uz, Uz]

Across sculpture, animation, vibration and light, Metz consistently returns to the body as a site of knowledge. Their work asks what might happen if we understood hypersensitivity as a form of ecological intelligence, if we treated stimming as generative movement, and if we centred touch and relationality over extraction and speed. In reframing neurodivergence as praxis, Metz is not only reshaping sculptural language — they are widening the field of who can speak, sense and be heard within