Jade Ulani YOung

The Edge of Words — an experimental literary novel set in the town of Words, where each resident personifies a word, centring on four characters: Unspoken Reality, who is real but does not have a name; Famous, who is not real but has a name; Lexi, the word detective; and Denial, the manager. The work layers fantastical word-art play with social commentary and philosophy, investigating the power of language to entertain, liberate, and oppress (2025–current)

Pain, Like the Oyster’s Pearl — a long literary letter to Virginia Woolf, rethinking ‘psychosis’ for epistemic and social justice (2025–current)

My Imbroglio — a transcript of worded thoughts without omission, designed as a publicly registerable internal monologue; a neuroscientific reductionism critique presented as a moving sound sculpture, a “giant brain flashing like in a neuroscience image”, on plastic duck feet (2024–2025)

Quotes to Quote and Phrases to Can: Sentences from a Nobody (2025)

The DSM-6: Revenge of the Neurodivergents' and Other Short Stories (2023–2025)

The Functions of a Belief — a queer novel about a group of friends, written improvised, three pages a day without stopping (2024)

Before I Turn into Ash: Omissions — an experimental stream-of-consciousness memoir originally improvised through vocal recordings and later restructured to explore memory, selective retellings, and erasure (2024)

Autotherapy: A Video Diary Experiment — transcribed PhotoBooth diary entries created without knowledge of eventual transcript (2023–2024)

No Words; No Words — two books with the same cover, presented in different versions: one without words, and one with words accessible only upon signing a legal agreement accepting full responsibility for interpretation. Conceived as a live-streamed, gentle protest, performance artwork that activates in response to legal challenge, with all outcomes forming part of the work itself (work in progress)

Counter-Erasure — a live performance of redacting words from the DSM-5 that wrongly pathologise trauma, protective or adaptive responses, and neurodiversity, filmed and projected onto a dance floor where people are invited to dance however they feel, celebrating the effects and intelligence behind the health-essential acts of stimming (work in progress)

The Non-Verbal but Sonic Dinner Table — a surrealist play in which a dinner table becomes sentient, producing sound and movement on the eve of a hosted gathering, while its owner chooses denial as a coping mechanism (work in progress)

The Eavesdropper — a short play featuring a woman on a green bench in the Botanical Gardens speaking aloud fragments of overheard conversation (2024)

Tinsel Boar — an absurdist music-theatre performance from the perspective of a Christmas pine tree who doesn't like what it's been forced to wear (for instance, sparkling baubles depicting Santa's face and ginger bread men), merging lo-fi electronic composition with dissonant vocal improvisation, culminating in the refrain: “Fuck your merry Christmas” (2022)

It’s the End of the World and My iPod’s on Shuffle — an experimental music-theatre work looping the single line of the title across shifting genres of original music to explore perception, affect, and sonic determinism (2021)

AI Got Soul — a techno-comedy performance combining AI-generated poetry and video satire to critique machine creativity and its limits in relation to human artistic intelligence (2020)

The Door with the Green Handle — a solo dance-theatre work exploring learned helplessness through repeated, increasingly futile attempts to open a freestanding door, ending in withdrawal and stillness (2018)

The Worst Artist in Margate — a digital exhibition and radical generosity project distributing over 60 original drawings with letters via social media in a single evening during a period of survival and creative reclamation (2015)

An Interpretation of the Double-Slit Experiment: Quantum Phenomena with Both Wave and Particle Aspects Interact with Their Environment (2026)

Re-thinking ‘Psychosis’ for Social and Epistemic Justice (2025-2026)

Wittgenstein’s Language Games, Layers of Meaning and Psychiatric Diagnoses (2022)