I as Object Un-Seen

With visual impairment, whether acquired or congenital, there is limited or no access to mirrors and photographic images of the self. As such the visually impaired person has a diminished or non-existent knowledge of their own body as an icon or object. Using the remarkable accuracy of digital 3D print technology, this piece grants access for the first time ever for the blind artist to his own body as an art object.

This installation consists of an assemblage of 3D printed figures and scaffolding. It is a triptych of scaled down figures of the artist moving through a strongly delineated and layered space. The figures are framed with layers of scaffolding that are a parody of gallery casements without the usual protective glass. This piece grants every visitor access to the touchable figures. As such it offers all visitors, sight disabled or otherwise, something close to equality of access. 

Layers of Vision – Living in a world made for sighted people

21st November — 16th December
Coinciding with UK Disability History Month.
The Arcade at Bush House, South Wing,
King’s College London, Strand, WC2B 4PJ
Free, no booking required.

Liberty Festival 22 – 24 July 2022

Sanctuary Café – Sit and have a drink with Stella!

This interactive and accessible installation is presented here to the Liberty Festival committee and to the people of Lewisham. The piece is a blend of the ordinary and the extraordinary; it consists of a life sized human figure sitting at a ready-made but significantly altered picnic table. The figure depicted is a 3D print of a well-known Lewisham based community worker – Stella Headley. Stella is shown drinking, eating and engaged in conversation. The other seats around the table are empty and visitors are warmly invited to sit with Stella and with friends and enjoy refreshments and a conversation. By so doing the boundary between the art and the beholders becomes blurred and ambiguous; the monumental statue has climbed down from its lofty, inaccessible plinth.

The table has been significantly altered in order to make it accessible for wheelchairs, buggies and infirm visitors. On the table are some cast objects that mimic ordinary café table clutter. The table includes a plaque together with some embedded braille that briefly describes Stella’s life and her work for the people of Lewisham.

Stella Headley has worked tirelessly and generously for the under-privileged of Lewisham since her childhood. She has an amazing passion for getting things done for the community. Stella has been involved in several food projects in Lewisham and her passion ensures no one knowingly goes hungry in the borough. She frequently goes beyond the food remit of a project in order to make deeper human connections with those she is helping.

Stella says: I am Sistah Stella Headley, I am Rastafari, and from a Black Caribbean family.  I am the youngest of five sisters, and was born in a council house in Sydenham in Lewisham, in the 1960’s. Growing up was often quite rough and tough as we were the only Black Caribbean family in our area.  There was a lot of racism in those days and not a day would go past and you don’t experience something negative.  It made us resilient though, and us 5 girls were formidable, WE stood up to racism and inequality from then right up until now.

91DIVOC – Gallery@oxo

Touch Me Not

A Pair of Pear Shaped Pears

Touch, perhaps the most fundamental of our senses, has been in short supply during the pandemic. Touch Me Not is about touching and not touching. The giant pears presented here don’t quite touch each other and yet visitors are warmly invited to gently touch them to experience their texture and their shape as best they can (please hand sanitise before and after touching). The pears are nearly identical in form, they were machined out of polystyrene and the machine was controlled by an algorithm which was created from a digital scan of a real Conference pear. I didn’t touch these pears at all until the finishing stages of production when myself and my studio assistant sanded down the surface and coated them with plaster and finally painted them.

A Pair of Pear Shaped Pears

Liberty Lewisham 2022

https://londonist.com/london/art-and-photography/lewisham-borough-culture-2022-d-deaf-disabled-neurodivergent-artists

 

 

There’s something lurking in the shadows that might be interesting

RCA School of Arts & Humanities MPhil/PhD Research Exhibition
PV: Friday 15 March | 6–9pm
Exhibition Open: 15–23 March 2019
9.30am – 5.30pm | Monday – Friday
1–6pm | Saturday 23 March
(closed 16 & 17 March)

INHIBITION

A series of twenty small mounds of cast Silicone measuring approximately 5 cms in diameter by 2-3 cms high. These Silicone mounds are lurid pink in colour, and each have an individual, amorphous shape that caricatures used, discarded chewing gum.   

Importantly the lumps of Silicone are currently stuck to the under-side of a small café table in the Dyson café at RCA, Battersea. The lumps of Silicone are placed together on the underside of one small table and arranged in Braille configuration spelling the word ‘inhibition’. They reference the ubiquitous presence of used, discarded chewing gum found in public places stuck to the ‘hidden’ surfaces of tables and chairs.     

Relevance to Research

My research examines the experience of blindness and how art can be used to express it. So, the ‘Inhibition’ piece interrogates the fact that to a blind person, the under-surface of objects is less clearly ‘under’ or ‘hidden’.  This is because, for a blind person, shadows are not apparent. Generally speaking, the upper surface of an object is no more revealing than the lower surface; examining an object by touch alone renders the surfaces of equal prominence. So, the discarded chewing gum fails to be hidden in the same way as it might be hidden visually. This is a powerful example of ‘blind-aesthetic’ and ‘blindness gain’.

Red Man in White Cage on Green Hill: 21st and 22nd July 2018

‘Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains’ – Rousseau

For two long hot days I sat with my installation in the blazing sunlight in a prominent spot in a public park situated in the middle of my home town. The installation consists of a large white-painted scaffolding cage containing a life-sized, naked, shop mannequin painted a lurid and shocking red colour. As the burning sun beat down on me as I sat next to the cage I gradually became a second red-man mimicking the red man in the scaffolding cage! I unwittingly  became part of the installation  echoing in life what I’d created as artifice.

Now I origianally conceived of this piece as a stark visual ‘icon’ – I thought it would be a striking and simple image to place a large white cage containing a red figure on lush and radiant green grass! The heat-wave put paid to the ‘lush’ grass. As time passed a deeper significance emerged post hoc from the event…

Being human is about being constrained, or confined, or having limitations on us that restrict us in some way. These limitations are on an infinitely variable spectrum and range from the strictures of social  convention or etiquette through to the damaging effects of disease or disability and then on to the harmful effects of false or unjust imprisonment.

The vertical bars on the cage are widely spaced thus allowing for the safe and easy ingress and egress to and from this caricature cage. This could be thought of as standing for the freedom or autonomy we all have on occasion, to accept or reject life’s shackles.

Throughout the two-day event a series of performers used the cage as a platform to play, sing, recite or rant. Thanks so much to musicians Ian Day, the Sukis, George Howe and Alison and The Mighty Collider; Poets Rose Saliba, Jackie Lord, David Vancauster and a host of children using the cage as bolt hole or photo-op. Thanks to you all for ‘breathing life’ into the inert steel, plastic and paint that is the stuff of this installation!

Finding words to describe the effing ineffable!

 

I attended a conference in London a couple of weeks ago called ‘The Art of Access’. The conference brought together visually impaired people, artists, educators and professional audio describers for an intensive day of talking, listening, and coffee and sandwich consumption! The conference sought to give air time to new thinking, current thinking, and best practice in the realm of giving the visually impaired access to the visual. I think the gathering was a great success with some very memorable moments.

Hoary old audio description issues were revisited: the pros and cons of subjective versus objective audio description of the arts, the risks and rewards of ‘bolt on’ versus integrated access to the arts , the costs and benefits of new technologies as applied to access.

The reason I am writing about this here is because of the contribution made to the conference by the professional audio describer and author of a new book on the subject, Louise Fryer. Her summary of what she considers important in audio description sits very comfortably with my own ideas on the subject.

Louise emphasised the importance of using simple language when describing the arts to the blind. Ordinary words should be employed to convey extraordinary visual phenomena.

She emphasised the importance of communicating the effect of the object being described. She stressed that at bottom ‘emotion’ is the common currency between describer and listener. To this end she quoted Olafur Eliasson and called for conveying the ‘felt thought’ when trying to find the words to describe what you are seeing.

Louise also stressed the importance of understanding the nature of ‘art’ itself as a prerequisite for describing art to others.

So the describer is not a disinterested conduit through which a blind spectator ‘sees’ the object. Rather he/she is an involved participant in a triangular relationship between object, describer and blind person with emotion being the medium of exchange.