The Spanish Gallery in Bishop Auckland: a land of missed opportunities

The Spanish Gallery is “the UK’s first gallery dedicated to the art, history, and culture of Spain”. It opened on 15 October 2021 in the small market town of Bishop Auckland, County Durham, and is part of the ambitious Auckland Project regeneration scheme.

On arrival, I was immediately impressed by the ramps, automatic doors, and spacious lifts. A wheelchair access audit had clearly been part of the museum’s design and wheelchair drivers were very well catered for. However, when I asked about large print, braille, and audio guides I was met with a baffled silence. “I don’t know about anything like that” said one staff member, “but there are volunteers in every room who will read things out to you if you ask them.” A well-meant offer, but the equivalent, for me, of a wheelchair user being told: “We don’t have ramps, but our volunteers will carry you up the stairs if you ask them.” I didn’t even bother asking about more creative access initiatives such as the provision of torches and magnifying glasses or live or recorded audio description.

Despite my all too familiar feelings of frustration, I made my way through the automatic doors into the first of several galleries. The paintings and some of the explanations were lit with spotlights and the rest of the space was in semi-darkness. It was impossible for me to read the small labels next to each picture, so I soon gave up even trying, and focused on attempting to read the larger explanatory text at the entrance to each room. Unfortunately, the design team had prioritized the overall look of the galleries over their accessibility. Whilst some wall-mounted text had reasonably good contrast, I’d say about half of the explanations did not meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). WCAG is the international standard for the accessibility of web content and can also be used as a helpful guide to making non-web content such as signs, notices, menus and gallery labels readable. (If you want to know how accessible your colour contrasts are, consult the brilliant Who Can Use tool to find out.)

Things got slightly better on the top floor. I was particularly interested in the wall-mounted copies of plaster casts originally made in the early twentieth century “by unnamed craftsmen documenting the sculptural heritage of Spain.”

 

The image shows wall-mounted 3-D printed copies of early 20^th century plaster-casts, themselves copies of the Virtues of Prudence, Courage and Temperance from the Sepulchre of Cardinal Tavera (1553)

The 3 statues are “factum facsimilies […] made from white light scanned data merged with high-resolution photogrammetry. They were 3D printed using SLA, moulded and cast in an acrylic resin.” They are part of the FactumFoundation project to produce a 3-D model of the 1553 Sepulchre. You can read more about the project on the Factum Foundation website. Apparently, it was Henry Cole, the first director of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, who initially championed the creation and display of recreations of works of art. For him it was a way of making “works of art freely available everywhere and to everyone.” Sadly, I was not allowed to touch the statues or the sepulchre. Ironically, the museum’s celebration of Cole’s vision of “shared cultural access” does not extend to non-sighted people. Even though many museums are using 3-D printing to make objects accessible to blind people, the objects in the Spanish Gallery have now become off-limits despite their reproducibility. The museum’s labelling tells me that “Access can take many forms from screens to headsets, glasses, hybrid mixes, but it can also be physical.” Indeed. Another missed opportunity.

As I was leaving the facsimile gallery, I overheard one staff member telling another about the QR codes that are included on a few of the gallery’s labels. My ears pricked up and with the help of my companions I located and scanned one.

 

The image shows a small gallery label accompanied by a QR code.

 I was taken to a web page with a longer – and crucially – zoomable – version of the gallery label. If only someone had thought to tell me about these QR codes at the beginning of my visit. 

This image shows my phone screen with the museum label enlarged thanks to the QR code. Presumably this webpage would also be accessible to Voice Over users.

Although not as good as an accessible app like Smartify (used down the road in the Bowes Museum), QR codes do make the gallery content more accessible to smart phone users. Despite watching me navigate the galleries with my white cane, no-one told me about the gallery’s only accessible feature.

I don’t know how much the Spanish Gallery cost. But I do know that its owners have created a land of missed opportunities. Accessibility was not built into the gallery's design and will now be hugely expensive and inconvenient to add. Staff are not briefed about how QR codes can function as an accessible feature. And the gallery has invested in 3-D replicas of sculptures that we are not allowed to touch. 

Smartify at The Bowes Museum

This week I visited the Bowes Museum in Teeside. It is a museum I last visited as a child. I had fond memories of the grandiose architecture, and I used to love the wonderful mechanical silver swan, but I remember being frustrated by not being able to appreciate the thousands pictures and objects housed there (3038 apparently.) This time I was confident that the Smartify app would give me better access to the art, and I was not wrong.

I know from my work on the Royal Holloway Picture Gallery Audio Described Tour that Smartify is a great way of making art accessible to people who, like me, don't usually see the paintings on display, let alone the interpretations of them. Smartify is a free-to-use smart phone app (but museums and galleries pay for its services).. It scans any given space for art works it recognises and then displays information about them, together with the work itself, on the phone screen. It wasn't originally designed for blind and partially blind users, but it has completely transformed the way I experience art galleries. 

I need to have my nose almost touching a painting before I can see anything more than an indistinct blur. As a child (perhaps even at the Bowes) I quickly learnt that this kind of proximity to art is not allowed. It tends to trigger literal or metaphorical alarm bells. But how can I appreciate the art on display if I can't get close enough to see it?

This time I wanted to concentrate on the museum's nineteenth-century art room on the second floor. My latest research project is about French writers' unwitting attempts at audio description and how they might inform twenty-first century access initiatives. I knew that Emile Zola had written a short description of 'Grrandmamma's Brreakfast'  (1865) by Francois Bonvin and this was the painting I had come to visit.

The image shows a screen shot from my iphone. This is what my phone displayed when it recognised the painting. A small image of the painting is at the top of the screen, followed by information including title, artist, date, dimensions and materials. There is also a paragraph with further information and a link to the museum's digital catalogue entry for the painting. This information is identical to that displayed on the label below the painting in the gallery. Non-blind visitors are thus given two ways of accessing information. On the other hand, Smartify is the only way for me to access this painting. Not only can I enlarge the image and zoom in on all its wonderful details, I can also enlarge the label text or use my phone's inbuilt accessibility feature VoiceOver to transform the text into audio. Thanks to Smartify, I can now access works of art independently. I don't need to ask a friend or relative to read things out to me and I can go to galleries when I want without having to fit in with scheduled audio-guided tours.

There is another feature of the Smartify app which is even more beneficial to me: the option to add audio files to any painting's information page. This is what we did to create the audio-described tour at Royal Holloway. I was delighted to discover that the Bowes Museum have included audio for a handful of their paintings. When I scanned El Greco's The Tears of St Peter I found two recordings where curators and art historians discuss the paintings in more detail. These are not originally intended for blind visitors but they are what I call 'unintended audio descriptions' because they give the listener visual information about the painting as part of a broader discussion. The same is true of all the artworks featured in the Bowes Museum's Young Curator's Tour.  Adding audio files to the Smartify app effectively turns my phone into a handheld audio description device. It is a brilliant way for museums to include interesting content for all whilst simultaneously immeasurably improving access for blind visitors like me. 

 

Audio Description at Royal Holloway

Image Description: The painting 'Man Proposes, God Disposes' by Sir Edwin Landseer hangs in its lavish golden frame among other paintings on a rich red wall in Royal Holloway's Picture Gallery. Read on for a link to a creative audio description of the picture.

Those of you who have been following Blind Spot Blog for a while will remember the 2015 Blind Creations conference and micro arts festival held at Royal Holloway, and organised by myself and Vanessa Warne (University of Manitoba). One of the highlights of the conference was a live audio-described tour of some of the paintings displayed in Royal Holloway's famous Picture Gallery. 

Since the success of Vanessa's audio descriptions at Blind Creations, I have been working with the College Curator, Laura MacCulloch to explore innovative ways of making the College’s Art Collections accessible to a wider public. I have also been researching and writing about creative audio description and talking to a lot of people about my theory of ‘blindness gain’. Laura has been working hard to secure some funding to make the Picture Gallery more accessible and has been using the museum and gallery app Smartify to create virtual information panels for all the gallery's pictures. 

Earlier this year, Laura was able to employ an audio-description intern to help us run a crowd-sourced audio description project. We invited volunteers from across the College community (including students, staff and alumnae) to produce their own creative audio description of paintings in the Picture Gallery. Unlike traditional audio description, creative audio description (CAD) does not claim to offer an objective description of an image. Instead it recognizes that each beholder will see things differently. It welcomes non-normative gazes and encourages individual and inventive responses to art. It celebrates diversity of interpretation and asks people to produce a subjective response using whatever words speak to them personally. These creative audio descriptions give both blind and sighted visitors a new way of experiencing art. They highlight the describer's responses to each painting's aesthetic and emotional aspects as well as to its visual appearance and place in the gallery. They are an excellent example of 'blindness gain'.

Our project has been put on hold during the Covid-19 pandemic, but Laura and assistant curator Michaela Jones have used Smartify to create a free online audio-described tour of a selection of paintings from the Picture Gallery. Thanks to this tour, these paintings are now accessible to blind people around the world. You will hear a short introduction by me followed by creative audio descriptions of 15 paintings from the Picture Gallery, including famous works such as ‘Man Disposes, God Proposes’ and ‘Princess Elizabeth in Prison at St James’’ alongside some lesser-known gems. Some of these are located high on the Picture Gallery’s walls and are not usually spotted by visitors to the gallery. 14 of the descriptions are by current students and staff and we have also included one of the original recordings from Blind Creations, where the project originated.

As well as improving access to the Picture Gallery and adding to the range of online gallery tours available for free during lockdown, this project has also enhanced student employability through the creation of internships; strengthened links between different parts of the college community; and created a set of creative audio descriptions which I will be able to use as my research into the benefits of creative audio description for everyone develops. 

Special thanks go to Laura MacCulloch, Michaela Jones, Emma Hughes and all the staff and students who volunteered to be part of the project. 

Blindness Arts: a Disability Studies Quarterly Special Issue

Co-organizing the 2015 Blind Creations conference with Vanessa Warne was one of the highlights of my academic career. As this post written in the conference's aftermath shows, the event was memorable above all for the sense of celebratory community it created. Almost as soon as the conference was over, Vanessa and I began making plans to continue the many productive conversations which started during those few summer days in Egham. We did not want or need to produce a traditional 'conference proceedings': our wonderful audio archive means that all the papers delivered at the conference are still available. Instead we wanted to extend the legacy of Blind Creations by publishing new work which responds to questions raised by our speakers in 2015. Just over three years after the conference, we are pleased and proud to announce the publication of a special issue of Disability Studies Quarterly which we have called 'Blindness Arts'. In our co-authored Introduction we explain that this title functions "in contrast with and as a companion to ‘visual arts'". This extract from later in the Introduction gives a flavour of the intersections between blindness, creativity, performance and access which the issue explores:

In the first section of our issue, we share a set of essays that explore methods for accessing cultural works. These essays take up a range of media, namely sculpture, film, theatre and the comic book, all of which have traditionally been understood as visual forms. The authors in this section challenge this overly narrow perception and share experiments with both audio description and the role of touch. As Fayen d’Evie’s and Georgina Kleege’s individual contributions to blindness studies are noted by other authors throughout our issue, it is fitting that we begin with their co-authored essay, in which they share their work on tactile interpretations of the collections at the KADIST Art Foundation, and call for new opportunities and methods for touching art. Like d’Evie and Kleege, Hannah Thompson also calls for a collaborative approach to blind access. In her essay on audio description (AD) in cinema, she engages with four films with blind protagonists in order to compare extradiegetic and intradiegetic approaches to AD and to argue for its creative potential. Louise Fryer also explores the possibilities and challenges of integrated AD by sharing her experiences as an audio describer who, in a break with traditional models of objectivity and neutrality, took an active role in a play written and performed by a blind theatre group. Arseli Dokumaci shares a video project and essay that together use an exploration of the everyday travel strategies of two disabled people to propose an AD practice shaped by crip time. The final essay in this section, Brandon Christopher’s comparative study of an audio version of a conventional comic and of Philipp Meyer’s tactile comic Life, explores audio and tactile access questions raised in other essays in this section and extends our issue’s exploration of blindness arts to include the comic book genre. Remaining attentive to questions of access, we turn in the next section to the experiences of artists and to works of art that comment on blindness, either explicitly or through their use of design elements associated with blindness. Sculptor Aaron McPeake opens this section by reflecting on the making, exhibition and reception of his works in bronze, offering insight into the role of sound and touch in experiences of them. The role of touch is also important to the art made by Florian Grond and David Johnson. In the issue’s second co-authored piece, they share their experiences as artists collaborating at a distance and they reflect on the central role of blindness in their creation of accessible art. As blind artists, both McPeake and Johnson have encountered sighted misunderstandings of their practices. In an essay that responds to the misrepresentation of blind artists and their working lives, Catalin Brylla proposes filmmaking methods that challenge supercrip narratives and make possible nuanced depictions of the creative lives of artists who are blind. In an essay on the contemporary proliferation of braille as a design element in creative works, including public art installations, made by and for sighted people, Vanessa Warne explores the appropriation of braille as a visual code. Heather Tilley offers an historical perspective on the visual depiction of blind people, analyzing nineteenth-century images of blind people reading by touch and messages about blindness that the visual record shares. A pair of essays in our final section explores different kinds of performances that have been shaped by blindness. Piet Devos analyzes two non-visual contemporary dance pieces and his experiences of them. He also discusses the practice of blind dancer Saïd Gharbi. Offering a personal reflection on her own vocal practice, Emily K. Michael moves between sacred and secular spaces to map the relationship between blindness, vocal performance and persistent myths of compensatory ability. We close the volume with a co-authored essay by Rod Michalko and Tanya Titchkosky that uses a trans-Atlantic journey and a dialogue between the authors to explore the theme of travelling blind and the ways that blindness transforms sighted understandings of the world when it enters into dialogue with them. The presence in this final essay of a series of ‘excurses’ functions as a kind of crip time, similar to the audio description method proposed by Dokumaci. In both cases, the contents of the narrative are translated into a different format so that an ableist timeframe is replaced with space for creative reflection. 

Unlike much academic writing, this volume is free, open access and accessible. Please read, enjoy, respond and share widely.

Multisensory Museums: Volunteers Wanted!

As part of a research project I am running over the summer, we are offering volunteers the chance to come and experience a truly multisensory and immersive museum or gallery visit. See below for details of two experiments you can get involved in!

1) Egham Museum

This is an image of a late-nineteenth-century magnetic electric shock machine such as the one used in Thomas Holloway's sanatorium at Virginia Water.*

If you are interested in taking part in a multisensory exhibition of a Magnetic Electric Shock Machine, come along to the Egham Museum and participate in our free research event! Refreshments will be provided. Egham Museum will be open to volunteers on July 17th and 19th from 10am-4pm, and on July 26th from 12pm-8pm: come and open your senses to new ways of experiencing the museum. For any queries or for more information, please contact Ella Turner or Stephen Pearce.

2) Royal Holloway Picture Gallery

This is an image of Edwin Henry Landseer's 1864 painting 'Man Proposes, God Disposes'.* 

Come along to the Picture Gallery to participate in our research event. Everyone is welcome to experience a multisensory exhibition of the infamous ‘Man Proposes, God Disposes’. The study will take approximately 20 minutes and involves a quick questionnaire. The Picture Gallery will be open to volunteers on July 20th and 23rd from 10am-4pm. Refreshments will be provided and volunteers who have signed up in advance will receive a £10 amazon voucher. To sign-up as a volunteer or for any more information, please contact Ella Turner or Stephen Pearce.

*I usually provide descriptions for any images I include in blog posts: in this case I can't, as doing so might skew the results of our experiments.... 

A Sensory Tour of the Watts Gallery

As part of my ongoing work on creative audio description, I have been collecting different ways of experiencing museums. In March I had two very different experiences at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and at the Guildhall Museum in Rochester. This weekend I took part in a sensory tour of the Watts Gallery, led by visual artist Monica Takvam. The Watts Gallery is a collection of late-nineteenth-century painting and sculpture by British artist G F Watts, one of the leading artists of Victorian England.

When we met Monica, she explained that rather than giving us a traditional audio-described tour of the paintings, she wanted to take a much more immersive approach to the collection. Before leading us into the gallery itself, Monica asked us to think about the surrounding grounds. We were encouraged to listen to our surroundings and asked to choose words to describe our sense impressions. Once in the gallery, Monica encouraged us to break with conventional ways of experiencing art. Rather than looking at the paintings and sculptures, she asked us to smell them and to find any that smelt particularly strongly. It had never occurred to me before that even sculptures which are more than one-hundred years old still smell of their materials. Paintings too carry the smell of oil paints in them, and a stronger smell can suggest several layers of paint.

This photograph shows me with my nose pressed close to Watts' cast-iron bust of Clytie

Instead of describing the whole collection, Monica focused on one picture, Watts' painting of Greek mythological figure Clytie. First, Monica encouraged the non-blind members of the group to participate in a collaborative description of the painting. Then she took us outside to a half-hidden sunken garden where we were able to touch a stone bust of Clytie which Watts made as a study for the painting. We also had the chance to explore the cast-iron bust pictured above. By juxtaposing painting and busts, Monica cleverly used Watts' own artistic practice to create a sensory experience of the painting.

In the final part of the tour, Monica, who is the artist-in-residence at the Watts Gallery this year, introduced us to her own work. I was particularly drawn to two photographic portraits of blind people hanging on the wall of her studio.

This photograph shows one of Monica's artworks. It represents a man's head and shoulders. The man's features appear blurred because they are behind a sheet of Perspex. Holes in the Perspex form words in braille. 

This portrait is hanging on the wall of Monica's studio at the Watts Gallery. Monica invited us to touch the Perspex cover and explore the holes pierced in it. The holes spell out words in braille but these words are too difficult for a braille reader to understand: like David Johnson's art installation they are 'Too Big to Feel'; they are also absences rather than raised dots. Sighted viewers are just as frustrated in their quest for information. Through these holes we are given tantalising glimpses of the photograph beneath. but it is not possible to build up a complete picture of the man's face. This piece challenges both blind and non-blind ways of seeing. It remains impervious to the sighted gaze whilst also denying blind readers easy access to it. It raises questions about how we see and how we look at other people. It also creates an association between blindness and sightedness which emphasises their shared lack of perception.

This photograph is a close-up of the Perspex cover with the braille holes in focus. Details from the photograph are visible through the holes whilst the portrait itself remains blurred.

Like her art, Monica's tour brought blindness and sightedness into dialogue. As well as myself, our group included one completely blind adult, two non-blind adults and two non-blind children. Rather than focusing on the blind members of the group, Monica included everyone: by privileging all our senses, and by thus introducing new ways of experiencing art, she encouraged everyone to rethink their relationship with visual dependency and to explore their neglected senses.

Audio Description in the Art Gallery 2

As part of some scoping work for my new research project on creative and collaborative audio description, I have been experiencing AD in various settings. Last week I went to a high-profile (and expensive) exhibition at an internationally renowned university museum whose AD provision was rather limited. Yesterday I went to a small exhibition at the Guildhall Museum in Rochester (Kent) who have adopted a much more inclusive, and impressive, approach.

This photograph shows a poster advertising 'The Value of Touch'

'The Value of Touch' is an exhibition of work by members of the Kent Association for the Blind Medway Art Group curated and facilitated by artist Wendy Daws, whose new touchable art works also feature in the exhibition. Yesterday's tour was particularly remarkable for the layers of interconnected and collaborative audio and tactile experience it revealed and encouraged. At the beginning of the project, in July 2016, the artists were given an audio and tactile tour of objects in the Guildhall Museum's collections by the collections manager Steve Nye. They then worked with Wendy to create tactile art works inspired by the museum's artifacts. Not only was art created in response to tactile and audio experience, it also had tactility embedded within it. This meant that yesterday's audio described tour, delivered by Lonny Evans from VocalEyes, could easily incorporate a tactile element because all the art works were designed to be touched as well as looked at. In addition, Wendy added her own touchable art works to the show.

This photograph shows Wendy's artistic responses to the artists' work. Lonny's audio description says: "'Low Relief Tactile Representations' captures in tactile form the key artworks from the exhibition. A significant motif from each of the artists' work has been selected and rendered in 11 separate crystacal plaster plaques moulded from carved clay. The raised plaques are creamy white and about the size of a large side plate. They are embedded in two rows into a purpose built grey table." What Lonny doesn't say is that beneath the artworks is a sign, in print and braille, which says 'Please touch gently'.

These artistic responses to the artists' responses to the museum's objects create a third layer of tactile experience which visitors can explore alongside the artworks. Lonny's description adds an audio layer. When experienced together these four elements represent both an artistic response and a tactile-audio translation; a brilliant example of how access can be literally built into art and how art can be inspired by access as well as being mediated through it.

After describing the general layout of the exhibition spaces, Lonny gave us an audio account of a selection of the artworks on display before letting us touch both the artworks themselves and some of the artifacts which inspired them. Lonny also included quotations from the artists and those artists who were present also spoke about their own works. The result was an immersive, collaborate and inclusive audio and tactile experience which enabled visitors to experience art in a multi-sensory way.

As well as writing and delivering the AD script, Lonny has agreed to make it available online so that anyone can use it as part of their gallery experience. This means that blind (and sighted!) people can get a sense of the exhibition before, during or after their visit. The museum has also produced large print and braille guides to accompany the exhibition.

When I asked the Ashmolean why they had not produced large print, braille or audio guides for their Degas to Picasso exhibition, they said that it is generally not worth producing such materials for a temporary exhibition. But yesterday's audio tour at the Guildhall Museum''s temporary exhibition gave 20 blind and partially blind people an unforgettable and immersive experience. It is also now available to anyone who wants it. This exhibition is a model of best practice which other museums and galleries should be encouraged to emulate. This is because access is celebrated here for its creative and collaborative potential. It is positioned at the centre of this exhibition, not added (or more often than not omitted) as a costly and cumbersome afterthought.

Audio Description in the Art Gallery

This image is a screenshot from the Ashmolean website. It is made up of three panels. The left-hand panel gives the title of the exhibition, in the middle is a picture of a mother and child which looks like a Picasso (but in fact isn't), and on the right is a panel with further information. 

In the February issue of their Museums Journal, the Museums Association included an article with the somewhat 'no-brainer' title 'Museums need to do more to welcome disabled visitors'. According to the article, whilst museums are keen to point out that their galleries are accessible to wheelchair riders, and that guide dogs are welcome, they do not always make the actual collections accessible to partially blind visitors. This is particularly true of temporary exhibitions and the Ashmolean Museum's current blockbuster show, 'From Degas to Picasso' seemed to be no exception. The show's website reproduces the frustratingly familiar misunderstanding of access evoked in the article. To the Frequently Asked Question: 'Is the exhibition accessible?' they provide the chirpy but misleading response:

Yes. Access to the exhibition is via lift and the entire exhibition is wheelchair accessible with handheld labels available.

Undeterred, I phoned up to ask about availability of audio description headsets, large-print labels or a Braille catalogue, I was not surprised to be told that none of the above existed. But I was delighted to be offered a 1-to-1 audio described tour of the exhibition from a knowledgeable expert-guide.

When I got to the museum, my guide Lynne was waiting for me exactly where I was expecting her to be. She introduced herself, led me up to the exhibition and gave me an overview of the history of the collection and its contents before we went into the three-room show. She then provided me with descriptions of a selection of the pictures, coupled with the kind of information that brings art and its history to life. My friends and family have been describing pictures to me for years, but none of them (apart from my Dad) know enough about art history to combine the kind of objective description used by audio describers with an insight into artistic techniques, context and the painting's place in the collection more generally. As Lynne adapted her descriptions to my interest, sight levels and knowledge of nineteenth-century French art, the tour became a collaborative response to the pictures. Indeed, at one point another gallery-goer chipped in with her interpretation of a detail in one of the exhibits.

The tour had other unexpected consequences. Lynne encouraged me to break the unspoken rule of gallery going and get as close to the paintings as I could. With my nose pressed up against the glass, and her fingers guiding my eyes, I could see globs of paint, brush strokes and chalk marks that I would never have dared to discover otherwise. I also noticed that as we moved from the nineteenth-century realism of David, Ingres and Millais, to the cubist work of Picasso and Braque, Lynne's descriptions reflected the visual difficulty of the pictures. As we together deciphered Albert Gleize's cubist portrait of Stravinsky, for example, our inability to find the language to describe the disjointed shapes on the canvas reflected the picture's own challenge to normative ways of both painting and seeing. I like to think that the cubists' challenge to conventional representation was being echoed in our unconventional approach to the guided tour. Part tour, part audio description, our collaborative exploration of a selection of the exhibition's works felt like a wonderfully immersive way of sharing different ways of seeing and talking about art.

I feel extraordinarily lucky to have been able to benefit from Lynne's time and expertise. But I am sure there are lots of partially blind people who will never access this art. Some will be put off by the website's failure to mention audio described tours. Those who are persistent enough to find the right number to call (FYI at the Ashmolean, access is handled by the education department), may not be free on the same days and times as Lynne. (As is so often the case tours are not usually offered on weekends or in the evening). Or they might be put off by the 1-to-1 format. This is wonderful art that everyone should be able to experience. Surely it can't be that difficult or expensive to record or transcribe Lynne's words and make them available in audio, large-print and braille versions for anyone who wants them.

Making Space for Accessible Art

Yesterday I was delighted to welcome Blind Creations artist David Johnson back to Royal Holloway. David’s large-scale outdoor installation ‘Too Big to Feel’, which was commissioned for the Blind Creations conference held at Royal Holloway in June 2015, is now part of the College’s Art Collections.

This picture shows 'Too Big to Feel' by David Johnson on the grassy slope below the hockey pitch. The piece is made up of 18 concrete domes, 17 of which are painted white, and 1 of which is red. They look like giant Braille dots and spell out 'Seeing Red' in grade 2 (contracted) Braille. 

Yesterday David presented his work in the context of the College’s ‘Making Space for Art’ lecture series.

This picture shows David during his talk. He is standing in front of a screen on which we are shown an image of 'Too Big to Feel' in its first location in front of the Founder's Building. (Photo by Ruth Hemus)

I particularly like the way that ‘Too Big to Feel’ celebrates the creative potential of Braille whilst at the same time raising questions about the opacity of language and its meanings more generally. By making Braille both the subject and the medium of his work, David invites non-blind people to engage imaginatively with the techniques blind people use to read and write. Rather than being the reserve of a few, Braille becomes visible to, and touchable by, everyone. Blindness’s creative potential is thus celebrated and assistive technologies are consequently transformed into exciting and innovative ways of questioning our relationship with language and the senses.

This picture shows another of David’s Braille creations,  ‘Eggs’. Three casts of egg boxes sit on a table. Inside each nestle concrete eggs. The eggs are arranged to spell out 'egg' in grade 2 Braille. (Photo by Ruth Hemus)

David uses the screen-reading software JAWS to access his computer. By hooking his laptop up to the seminar room’s projector, we were able to see images of David’s works whilst at the same time hearing the computer’s audio prompts to him. This had the unintended consequence of demonstrating to non-blind members of the audience how screen reading technology works whilst simultaneously revealing its artistic potential. As he does with Braille, David uses JAWS in his artistic creations. His work ‘Rosie One’ is an audio installation in which the screen-reader’s response to a word document reveals both the arbitrary nature of language and the human brain’s ability to jump between two different interpretations of the same sounds.

You can listen to the whole of David's talk, including 'Rosie One' by clicking here.

As well as using various kinds of assistive technology in his work, David also works with friends and assistants in the creation of his art works.  David’s blindness means that there are times when he has to trust other people to make choices for him, particularly when he wants to include colour in his work.

This picture shows 'Citrus Corners': several black triangles, which have been made from casts of the inside of plastic bags, sit on a black perspex square on a table. The tips of these 'corners' have been painted yellow. David explained the process of communication involved when his assistant helps him decide which shade of yellow to use. (Photo by Ruth Hemus)

David’s collaborative art practices challenge the received notions that dependency on others is a sign of weakness, and that disabled people should strive for independence. During his talk, David asked each member to the audience to create a human figure out of plasticine.  At the end of the talk, he asked us to place these figures in a circle, facing inwards. The resulting artwork was a celebration of collaboration: on their own each figure meant nothing, but together they stood for the creative power of the group.

This picture shows the finished collaborate artwork. Fifteen green plasticine figures of various shapes and sizes stand or sit on a table. They are in a large circle and are all facing inwards, towards each other. (Photo by Ruth Hemus)

I am delighted that as a result of Blind Creations, my collaboration with David will continue. In February we travel to Boston to take part in a panel at the 2016 Transcultural Exchange Conference and David has also secured Arts Council funding to visit Art beyond Sight in New York and to present a pop-up exhibition in Montreal. We also hope to invite him back to campus later in the year to run more collaborative art-making workshops with our students.

Too Big to Feel

This image shows a sign with David Johnson's name printed on it.

Blind Creations, the international conference and micro-arts festival I am organising with Vanessa Warne, is only two weeks away. Yesterday I was delighted that David Johnson, one of the conference's exhibiting artists, installed his giant outdoor art work on Royal Holloway's beautiful campus.

This image shows David's concrete domes nestling amidst foam blocks in the back of the van he used to get them from his studio to campus.

Once David and his friend James had arrived on campus, their first job was to check that the domes had survived the journey. They then began the painstaking task of using string and tent pegs to mark out the exhibition space.

This image shows David and James dividing the grassy slope into sections using string and tent pegs.

The installation is in fact a common expression written in Grade 2 (contracted) Braille. So David needed to divide the grassy slope into 7 sections, each representing a single Braille cell. Each cell was separated by a small gap. The measurements had to be precise so that the domes were evenly spaced.

This image shows James guiding David along the path next to the grassy slope. David is using his white cane to check that the slope has been properly divided into equally sized cells.

Once David was happy that the string was in the right place, it was time to start installing the domes. David and James unloaded and placed each dome one at a time. They wored backwards, starting with the expression's final Braille cell.

This image shows David and James carefully carrying the first dome along the path. David cast each dome himself in concrete and each weights around 30 kilos.

It was crucial that each dome was placed in exactly the right position so that the symmetry of the Braille was maintained. David and James took a lot of time to ease each dome into place.

This image shows David and James carefully placing the domes on the grassy slope. They are using the pegs and string to ensure the domes are positioned in place.

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This image is a close-up shot of David and James placing one of the domes in position 1 of a ginat imaginary Braille cell.

Once David and James had placed all 18 domes in position, they removed the string to reveal the final installation.

This image shows the finished installation with the College's Windsor Building in the background.... and the video below, taken by my friend Ruth, pans across the whole installation from left to right.