The Joyful Art of Sandra Ormiston

Sandra is a complex, mute, autistic woman - and a wonderful and celebrated artist.

( Edited in 2023 from an original paper: “Sandra’s eye view” in Mental Health Care, Dec 1998 Vol 2 Issue 4. Author Rob Kay, and available online )

Sandra was born in Stirling on March 2nd 1963. Her prolific artistic output draws on a wide range of experiences and interests, especially holidays, social events like weddings and dinners, shopping, clothes and fashion. Her inspiration ranges from the intimate to the formal, and gives evidence of a growing artistic maturity. Her pictures are especially strong in composition, and her use of colour is bold and stylish.

As a child, she was thought to be deaf and autistic, and a learning disability was not suspected until she was nineteen years old. She attended Dawson Park School and then Donaldson’s School for the Deaf in Edinburgh where she learned to sign, to read and write. From the moment she could hold a pencil she wanted to draw. However, she has never attended formal art classes.

Sandra appears to have inherited her talent from her father, who attended Glasgow School of Art and went on to work as an industrial designer. She is the oldest of three children. Her brother and sister are both talented amateur artists.

Sandra was admitted to the Royal Scottish National Hospital, Larbert in 1983, where she lived for over ten years.

In July 1994 she left the hospital and now (at the time of writing) lives at a residential home for people with learning disabilities in Falkirk managed by NHS Forth valley, where she has her own room and contributes to the household in many ways. I first met her in my capacity as Service Development Manager for the Trust, with direct managerial responsibilities for this and several other residential care group homes.

Sandra has difficulty communicating in a conventional way - she cannot speak but has a very expressive range of expressions and gestures. She uses Makaton and BSL very unconventionally and enjoys making up new signs.

She attended a Day Centre in Grangemouth three days a week, where she enjoyed pottery and ceramics as well as pursuing her painting. She also regularly attended ‘Project Ability’ , an arts and disability charity - of which I was honoured to be a Trustee for four years. Here’s her page there.

Sandra prefers using pencils, felt pens, and crayons to paint. Much of her work combines these media. It is not unusual for Sandra to work on a picture for several weeks, sometimes crushing and then rescuing the work repeatedly.

One curious feature of the work is that Sandra often fills the back of the paper with written text which describes the events or scene described. The exact purpose of this writing is unclear.

The text reveals an unorthodox imagination which is highly visual in imagery. The words are not usually separated by spaces or line endings in the conventional sense, and use lower case throughout. Sandra very occasionally utilises punctuation - mainly full stops and exclamation marks. Events and stories are described primarily in terms of visual memories.

Sandra draws from memory, not from life. The level of detail is often very exact, but the objects and people are highly structured and symmetrical. Her list of colours in ‘street shopping’ is precise: “light brown blue red-orange rouge light blue”

Sandra has received some local and national recognition. One of her drawings was the winning entry in a competition organised by Falkirk Social Services in 1997 to design a Christmas card, and more recently, won silver at the Paralym World Art Cup in Japan in 2020 !

Acknowledgements: The staff at her residential home gave invaluable assistance in collecting information about Sandra’s life and obtaining her and her families permission, help and support in writing this article.

© Rob Kay 2007