Barry Flanagan, 'Elephant' 1981 (audio description) Audio description

Stop 1.

Hello and welcome to the audio guide to Beyond the Visual. My name is Aaron McPeake. I’m an artist and one of the curators of the exhibition Beyond the Visual.

The guide has 16 stops, each around 5 minutes long, marked by yellow textured circles on the floor throughout the galleries.

To listen, you can scan the QR codes on the gallery walls or press the corresponding number on one of the handheld audio players available just outside the sculpture galleries. To learn how to use the audio player, please press the green button at the bottom right corner of the device.

Beyond the Visual is the UK’s first major sculpture exhibition in which blind and partially blind practitioners are central to the curatorial process and make up the majority of participating artists. As the exhibition demonstrates, blindness is no barrier to creating ambitious, provocative and internationally significant sculpture. Incorporating touch, sound, smell and movement, the works are playful, poetic and often deeply thought-provoking. They challenge the dominance of sight in how we make and experience art, inviting visitors to encounter sculpture in ways that reach far beyond the visual.

Beyond the Visual brings together sixteen international artists and includes both historical and contemporary works. Historical sculptures by Henry Moore and Barry Flanagan show the importance of touch for both artists, while new commissions by David Johnson, Sam Metz, Serafina Min, Aaron McPeake and Ken Wilder engage sound, scent and touch to impart a variety of experiences. The exhibition continues throughout Henry Moore Institute, with a new sound and video installation by Fayen D’Evie with Georgina Kleege, Hillary Goidell and Bryan Phillips located in the Study Gallery near the lift. You can take the lift or stairs down to the basement Seminar Room for a rolling screening of audio-described films.

The exhibition is the culmination of a three-year research collaboration between Henry Moore Institute, University of the Arts London and Shape Arts. It was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and curated by Dr Clare O’Dowd with Professor Ken Wilder and Dr Aaron McPeake.

The next stop is an audio description of Barry Flanagan’s sculpture Elephant. Enter the main gallery through the automatic doors and turn right – you’ll find the Elephant made of bronze there.

[Music]

Stop 2. Track 1.

Hello. My name’s Joseph Rizzo Naudi. I’m a blind writer and I’ll be introducing you to this sculpture called Elephant, made in 1981 by Barry Flanagan.

Elephant is, as the name suggests, a sculpture of an elephant. It’s quite a small elephant, around 50cm tall, and it’s made of bronze. In this exhibition you are invited to touch the sculpture and feel the elephant’s rough surface. The elephant’s ears are flat to its body. Its trunk is slightly bent in the middle and points downwards, matching the form of its smaller tail at the other end of its body. The elephant’s four legs are joined at the sculpture’s base, to create the impression that the elephant is balancing on a small, round podium, as though it were about to perform a circus trick.

Flanagan was born in Prestatyn, North Wales, in 1941 and died in Ibiza in 2009. One of Britain’s most significant sculptors, his work was seen as radical and independent from the start. He studied at St. Martin’s School of Art in 1964, later teaching there and at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. Flanagan represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1982 and was awarded an OBE and elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in 1991. Flanagan participated in an exhibition called Revelation for the Hands, which took place next door to us at Leeds Art Gallery in 1987. The exhibition featured work by Barbara Hepworth, Jacob Epstein and Henry Moore, and blind and partially blind visitors were invited to touch the sculptures.

The elephant is made of cast bronze. During the casting process, molten metal is poured into a mould through small channels called sprues. Sprues are normally removed from a sculpture after it has been cast, but to make this elephant, Barry Flanagan has very cleverly incorporated the sprues into the sculpture as the elephant’s trunk, tail and legs. As you touch the sculpture, you might be able to get a sense of how the molten bronze flowed through Flanagan’s mould to form the shape that’s under your hands. Although he worked in many different materials throughout his career, Flanagan loved the casting process and the experience of being in the heat and noise of the foundry.

Here is the artist describing this in a radio interview with Andy Holden for Resonance FM, recorded in 2008:

Barry Flanagan: “Well, the medium bronze is the kind of touchstone. People are aware of bronze as a medium and immediately rather interested in the procedure. Yes, I usually say I favour bronze because I find the foundry and the working atmosphere as exciting as standing in the wings of a theatre or, you know, the sort of first night buzz or, you know, the creative atmosphere.”

Andy Holden: “Is it sense of being maybe a part of a larger process of some kind of working with people as much as being rather than being the isolated thing?”

Barry Flanagan: “Yes, it’s the choreographic buzz. And the integrated actions of people who know what they’re doing and driving towards same objective. That I do find exciting. Once a sculptor’s out of his garret or his basement and he’s in the foundry working, well, I identified that with the working process and dealing with materials, irrespective of the artist’s contribution, dealing with the materials and seeing a project through, that to me loosely is a kind of a trade.”

[Music]

Stop 2. Track 2.
Barry Flanagan, Elephant 1981

On a low rectangular plinth sits a heavy object, the size of a small sack of coal. The object is made of bronze, dark but with flecks that reflect the light, almost like gold. You can’t help but touch it. And on doing so, it becomes apparent that this is not just an abstract form, but a depiction of an elephant. Perhaps a young elephant, given its proportions. It has a round, compact body, with relatively small ears, a long trunk and a little tail that dangles down, short and stumpy. It seems to be trying to lift its right front foot from some kind of pedestal on which it balances, conjuring up associations with circuses and performing animals; but the elephant cannot escape the base it’s joined to.

Touching the object puts you in contact with the artist’s moulding of form. He hasn’t tried to smooth the surface but has intentionally left it lumpy. There are indentations and marks from the casting. And lots of big lumpy bits, almost like you want to get your fingernails into some of them, to feel the material. There are scratches engraved into the head going upwards. And the front of the trunk has ridges and is a little crinkly. And then there are those little eyes! They’re just holes poked into the wet clay. Yet there’s something mournful about those eyes.

The elephant would have been moulded in clay, then a wax cast made; the object seems to recall these previous material states. And the fact that the animal is morphed with its pedestal makes sense if we imagine it as a negative form, an empty vessel turned upside down, with molten metal poured in at the base and flowing through the feet and legs into the body. The trunk and tail are where the gasses would escape as the hot metal fills the mould. Ingeniously, the channels (called sprues and risers) integral to the bronze casting process have been incorporated into the sculpture, shaping the animal’s very form.

Maybe this is why the work is so different from Flanagan’s bronze hares, which communicate a kind of joy and weightlessness. Close up, we read the form abstractly, especially when explored through the hands. And knowing that the artist made the work for the 1981 exhibition Sculpture for the Blind changes our reading of it. Perhaps he was trying to capture the texture of a full-size elephant? It does feel like the mud-caked skin of an elephant that has wallowed in silty water then been in the sun: that rough dryness, like cracked leather. Perhaps Flanagan realised that it is touch, not sight, that triggers the idea of an elephant’s presence.

This is the end of Stop 2, Track 2.

Stop 3. Track 1.

Hello, my name is Joseph Rizzo Naudi. I’m a blind writer and I’m going to introduce you to Mother and Child: Arch, a sculpture by Henry Moore.

It was made in 1959 and is a bronze cast of a very abstract shape that loosely resembles an arch with a face. The whole sculpture is highly tactile, something that was very important to Moore. In this exhibition, you are invited to touch the sculpture and experience the contrasting surface textures, the temperature of the bronze and the metallic scent that the metal will leave on your fingers.

The lower half of the sculpture is rough, heavily textured with carved marks. The face of the mother rises out of the top of the arch and has very simplified features: two small circles for eyes and a triangle for a nose, cut into the surface of the bronze. There are three smooth, round protrusions swelling out along the mid line of the sculpture. These protrusions make for a noticeable contrast with the rough texture found on the lower part. The uppermost protrusion has a single hole carved into it that could be an eye, but it’s hard to tell where the mother ends and the baby begins.

Moore was born in Castleford in 1898 and died in 1986. He was one of the most important British artists of the twentieth century and arguably the most internationally celebrated sculptor of the period, and it’s possible to see his semi-abstract monumental bronzes all over the world. Moore was a champion of the role of touch in appreciating sculpture and his work appeared in several exhibitions for blind and partially blind people during the 1980s and 90s.

In 1968 the photographer John Hedgecoe visited Henry Moore and his wife Irina at their home. They recorded a series of conversations about Moore’s life and work. In the extracts that follow, the artist reflects on the theme of the mother and child and the importance of touch in sculpture.

Henry Moore: The Mother and Child is a theme that’s been universal from the beginning of time. Some of the very earliest sculptures we have are from Neolithic times, are mothers and children. It’s a subject, just like talking about human figure or the female figure. Mother and child theme is just something universal.

One likes people to want to touch. Because touch is a part of your understanding of three-dimensional form. You don’t know roughness and smoothness, and you don’t know roundness and sharpness and all those. You’d know it much more intensely if you’ve felt it. If you’ve been pricked by something, my goodness, you know it much more than if you just look at it. And if a surface is meant to be highly polished and smooth, touching it makes you know, well, it gives you a reality into it. Having these notes ‘Do not touch’ in the sculpture exhibition… Well, I want the people to touch, because people’s fingers are not fouls, they’re not knives, they’re not sharp. Touch is a part of your understanding of form.

[Music]

Stop 3. Track 2.
Henry Moore, Mother and Child: Arch 1959

We are at a low rectangular plinth, the top painted white. On the plinth sits a heavy object, cast in bronze, in two separate sections. The lower, less substantial part is a thin bronze pedestal, the inclined sides making the flat top wider than its base, like an inverted trapezium. On top of this podium sits a form that hovers between abstraction and figuration, which the title of the work reveals is a mother and child, though exactly where one figure begins, and the other ends is unclear.

The sculpture feels domestic in scale when we think of Henry Moore, who was known for his large-scale public works. It is like a maquette for an unrealised monumental sculpture. It is of a size that can be discerned through touch as a single entity, in that if we stretch out our arms, we can pretty much embrace the entire object. There is an added intimacy here being able to encounter something so close and face to face.

While free-standing, the sculpture definitely has a front and back. The front side, though textured, is smoother than the extremely rough back which has no recognisable figurative features. As we encounter the sculpture through touch we are drawn towards the mother’s head. The face is smooth and flattened, her neck angled so that she faces towards the child; she has graphic rather than modelled features, with little round eyes and a triangle for the nose which seems to have been cut out like you would cut out eyes and nose when carving a pumpkin. And then there’s quite a heavy shoulder coming out to the left, and two breasts, angled as though the torso is leaning towards her child in a protective gesture. While there are no arms as such (just the merest suggestion of a hand), the mother, her weight shifted to the side, merges with the child she embraces, forming an arch. The child’s head is simplified as a highly polished rounded form, the facial features reduced to a single little hole, a single eye or a mouth demanding to be fed. Together, the mother and child form a bridge – a single, conjoined entity reminiscent of natural arches emerging from the sea, or the knobbly pieces of flint which Moore would collect.

The bronze is a rich, dark brown. The sculpture’s texture is extraordinary to explore through our hands. The back is extremely rough, like a cliff face. But even the front, which is smoother, is gouged into, forming striations or hatchings not unlike a wrinkled elephant’s skin. But there are also smooth and polished sections, protuberances such as the face, the two heads and the breasts, the latter which are lighter in colour registering a history of touch. Intriguingly, the mother’s head, angled forward, seems to be emerging from the form, like a tortoise head and neck emerging from its shell, giving the feeling that the figurative elements seem to be breaking free from their base materiality. A similarly sized variation of Mother and Child exists in white plaster, owned by the Art Gallery of Ontario.

End of Stop 3, Track 2.

Stop 4. Track 1.

Joseph: Hello, my name is Joseph Rizzo Naudi. I’m a blind writer and I’m here with David Johnson, one of the artists exhibiting at the Beyond the Visual exhibition. Thank you so much for joining me, David.

David: Hi there, Joseph. Thank you for having me.

Joseph: So we’re going to give people listening a sense of your artwork, the artwork that you’re exhibiting at the exhibition. And I’m wondering what people will find when they enter the gallery space and come across your work.

David: There’s a piece called Nuggets of Embodiment, and it consists of a display of biscuits. They’re made out of plaster, very high-grade plaster, very faithful renditions of ordinary biscuits that are very common in our culture in the UK. These biscuits will be presented on a shelf and in a tin, but the tin will be surrounded by a kind of overflow of these biscuits scattered in a slightly sort of random style around the tin. Visitors will be encouraged to feel the biscuits, hold them, pick them up, and place them back again onto the display. We’re going to have them on a shelf, a fairly large, wall-mounted shelf, because we quite like the idea of a sort of domestic scale for this piece, so that people can relate to it on that sort of everyday level. Yeah, because the piece sort of celebrates, I suppose, in a way, the ordinariness of offering someone a biscuit as a gesture of friendship and hospitality and comfort, nourishment, all these things.

Joseph: Thanks very much, David, for those introductions to your works. Could you give us a sense of your practice and how these artworks fit into it?

David: I am a blind artist, I think is perhaps the most important thing to say in this context. These pieces are the most important things that I am presenting at the show. When I think about them, when I encounter them myself, just by holding a biscuit, I can sort of see a biscuit as well. So for me, and I believe lots of other people, when they hold a biscuit, they will also see a biscuit. If they’re sighted, perhaps they might want to try closing their eyes and concentrating on that mental experience. This, I think, demonstrates the inherent connectivity between the sensory faculties that we, I think, awkwardly and artificially sort of separate them out as being, you know, the five faculties, sensory faculties. But I think they’re all kind of one, really. And all of them are within each other. They’re all connected at a very fundamental level. I like to think that my artwork, perhaps demonstrates that connectivity, and help people to make those sensory connections, which can get lost in our visually biased contemporary lives.

Joseph: David Johnson, thank you so much for taking us through your artworks and a little bit into your practice.

[Music]

Stop 4. Track 2.
David Johnson, Nuggets of Embodiment 2024–25

An abundance of biscuits. They spill onto a wide white shelf from an open biscuit tin full to the brim. The biscuits are pale golden brown in colour, but the tin has been painted a deep, matt black. It sits on a slight platform, with its lid abandoned to one side. Some of the scattered biscuits are glued down, some are loose, so that they can be picked up, examined, and then put back down again. The temperature and hardness of the biscuits, and their clink as we put them back down, reveal that they aren’t real, crumbly biscuits that can be eaten but are made from a hard plaster. But they seem remarkably real, the size and colour recalling a certain brand of digestive biscuits. And there’s a game being played here with things that seem to be one way but are in fact another, throwing us off-balance: a biscuit which is not a biscuit, where any nourishment is intellectual rather than literal. There’s a playfulness in making an artwork about something so ordinary and so familiar as sharing a biscuit.

If we are in any doubt as to what type of biscuits these refer to, each of the biscuits has a wheatsheaf pattern indented into the top, and a familiar pattern of inset dots; but feeling their surface also reveals raised braille dots in the middle, and then a word underneath stamped into the surface in lowercase letters. The indented text repeats the word spelled out by the braille dots. The translation feels this way round because the braille dots are sharper than the indented text. In the mould, of course, the words would have been positives, and the dots negatives. But the resulting cast privileges braille – which the artist uses in his everyday life – over the written text. The words on each biscuit vary: apex, currency, comma, attunement, anamnesis. This is definitely a work about language, which seems to be a common feature in a lot of the artist’s work.

Are the words significant? Attunement suggests a kind of alignment. To the artwork? To each other? What does anamnesis mean? A dictionary reveals it is to do with memory or recollection: to recall, or a calling to mind. But it also has a medical use, referring to a patient’s account of their own medical history. Maybe the artist is using it in a double sense, referring to his own medical history and the retinitis pigmentosa that resulted in his blindness? They’re clearly words that mean something to him, playing with double meanings. Currency might refer to an intellectual capital but also to the biscuit as a kind of currency: an exchange between the artist and the visitor, who can literally take a biscuit away with them as a kind of gift, exchanged for filling out a feedback form.

Gallery staff tell us that there are 10,000 of these biscuits, of which the display before us is just a small selection. Making these has been a collaborative venture, with workshops and volunteers. A cottage industry. But the finished work also gathers people together, where they exchange ideas, but are also aware of each other as embodied, sensory beings. Perhaps that is why the piece is called Nuggets of Embodiment; used metaphorically, they are nuggets of wisdom.

End of Stop 4, Track 2.

Stop 5. Track 1.

Joseph: Hello, my name’s Joseph Rizzo Naudi. I’m a blind writer and I’m joined by Emilie Louise Gossiaux, who is one of the exhibiting artists in the Beyond the Visual exhibition. Hello, Emilie.

Emilie: Hi, Joseph.

Joseph: So we’re going to give the people listening a sense of your artwork as it appears in the exhibition. And what is it that people might find?

Emilie: My sculpture is titled Doggirl. And you will find a small doll-sized ceramic sculpture of a hybridised human-animal figure of a woman’s body with a dog’s head. And the dog’s head is modelled after my English Labrador retriever named London, who is my guide dog from 2013 to 2025. She’s lying on her back and kind of like if you imagine the Egyptian god Anubis, but with the head of an English Labrador retriever.

Joseph: So I’m imagining almost like the size of a kind of action figure or like a Barbie doll, that kind of size. And it will be fixed, I imagine, to a place or some sort of display.

Emilie: Yeah, like a fishing line will be wrapped around the body so you can’t lift it up.

Joseph: I’m wondering what colour it is.

Emilie: It’s an off-white kind of greyish colour. It’s a very, very, very light grey.

Joseph: How do you imagine that people will interact with this sculpture when they come across it in the gallery?

Emilie: You would touch it very gently, start from the top of the head and go down, follow the curve of its ears and the bridge of the dog’s snout. And then that carries you down to its human’s neck and then travel down to the belly where you’ll find six nipples. You know, very soft and gentle. The ceramic isn’t glazed. So it’s an earthenware ceramic, which makes it very soft, like soft stone when you touch it.

Joseph: So I’m imagining like a figure lying on their back would, usually feet would point upwards.

Emilie: Yeah, so this one’s different. Her feet are pointing down almost like she’s floating, you know. And something that I like about these type of small figurines is that it’s reminiscent of votive sculptures. Votive sculptures in Greek antiquity, they often have like figures that they sculpt out of clay or they carve out of marble or some stone and they leave it in a temple. It’s a deceased figure or someone who’s died or someone who is ailing. You know, you place them in the temple and that’s supposed to be a way for that person to be washed over, you know, by a god or a goddess.

The title of this piece is Doggirl. And it is part of a series. It is about how I see myself with my guide dog London as a dog girl and how I think other people might see me, you know, attached to a dog. So when I think about my relationship with my guide dog London, I think of us as becoming a whole organism or a super being. Through this great love and kinship that I have with London, I think I will continue carrying that on in my work, even though she’s passed away.

Joseph: Thank you so much, Emilie, for introducing us to your artwork.

Emilie: Thank you, Joseph. It’s been a pleasure.

[Music]

Stop 5. Track 2.
Emilie Louise Gossiaux, Doggirl 2021

Doggirl is a ceramic sculpture. It lies flat on its back, torso facing upwards, on a low, rectangular plinth. It is a small, doll-sized figure: a hybrid of woman and dog, like a statuette of an Egyptian god. The figure has a dog’s head, but human-like eyes with large lashes which fingertips reveal are incised into the surface; and a protruding snout and large nose with floppy ears, just like a Labrador. But she (let’s call her that) has a woman’s body, other than her six nipples or, given her dog-like nature, teats. She has an indented navel and pubic hair, like her eyes scratched into the surface, and human arms and legs, with hands that are clenched, and quite clumpy. The feet, which are not quite symmetrical, point into the air.

The figure is made of earthenware ceramic, matt rather than shiny, in an off-white colour. It feels cool to the touch, and tapping it lightly tells you that it is hollow. Perhaps it is cast in sections, like an Easter egg, then modified by hand. It certainly feels smoothed by hand rather than with a tool. Running your hands lightly over the object reveals the figure is attached to the plinth with fishing wire, which is barely visible even to those with unimpaired vision. A visceral effect is triggered by the reclining pose, with all its associations. There is, at least initially, almost a reluctance to touch. Some visitors say they feel uncomfortable exploring the body with their hands. Is this because of Doggirl’s sexuality? She doesn’t feel like a sexualised object. Or is it because of the figure’s vulnerability and associations with death? Because what she really resembles is an ancient votive figure: a figure offered to a deity. There is a tenderness here, and a fragility at odds with the determination suggested by the touch and grip of exploring hands. Poignantly, we learn that the artist morphed her own body with that of her beloved guide dog, a Labrador Retriever called London who recently passed away. The work is called Doggirl because it is a self-portrait of the artist and her dog conceived as a single entity.

And there’s definitely something here about intimacy of scale: the familiarity that you can have with an object that’s this size, that can be handled. There is such a temptation to lift the figure up, which in the gallery we can’t do. This is reminiscent of prehistoric figurines that, though often presented vertically in museum vitrines, were made to be held in the hands. Here we’re looking down on this figure, so it feels like a completely different experience, whether that experience is visual or through touch. And the fact that we can walk 360 degrees around the figure makes the plinth, as slab, an important part of the piece as a kind of essential support.

End of Stop 5, Track 2.

Stop 6. Track 1.

Joseph: Hello, my name is Joseph Rizzo Naudi. I’m a blind writer and I’m joined today by Lucia Beijlsmit, who is one of the exhibiting artists at the Beyond the Visual exhibition. Hello, Lucia.

Lucia: Hi, Joe. Good afternoon.

Joseph: I’m wondering if you could give us a very brief description of what these artworks are that you’re exhibiting.

Lucia: Well, I have here four windows in different shapes and different kinds of stones, three in marble and one in sandstone. Depending on the window you touch, you might feel a very rough surface or a polished surface. I like to maintain the natural fracture of the stone on the outside and maybe sometimes an industrial cut. And then I open the stone to make a window where you can look through. And I think they are put this in the exhibition so you can see other artwork through the window.

Joseph: So the windows will be used to frame other artworks in the exhibition. I’m wondering what kind of size it is and where might I have found a window like this before?

Lucia: During our holidays in Spain, I was inspired exactly by the ruins of castles on top of the hills. And the sandstone window is about 40 centimetres high and 31 wide and 20 deep. And it weighs about 20 kilos or more. And it just gives you the impression of a medieval castle. So it’s almost like a pointed cone at the top?

Joseph: Yes, and I’m wondering what colour this window will appear if I was to look at it.

Lucia: Yeah, the colour is brownish, beige, greyish. It’s quite a dull colour at the outside. There are lichens. Lichens have grown on the stone because it’s a quite porous stone. And lichens easily grow on this stone in a neighbourhood without contamination. And I live in the countryside without any industry. So I have the lucky opportunity that lichens adhere to nearly all my sculptures. And they might have different colours.

Joseph: So the artwork has become a home for these lichen organisms over time.

Lucia: Yeah, they take over.

Joseph: And so you said that there were three other windows which are made from marble.

Lucia: Yes.

Joseph: Are they similar in shape to the sandstone window or are they quite different?

Lucia: They are quite different. They are different colours and different shapes. One is called the Pink Window. And it is shaped nearly like a triangle, like a rough triangle. The second one is called a Framed Window. And it has the veins like the Spanish ham can have. So with the fat and the flesh, the pink veins run through the fat.

Joseph: Yes. And what about the final window that we haven’t described yet?

Lucia: Yeah, that’s white marble and that’s completely irregular on the outside. And there are stairs, stairs going to the opening on the front side.

Joseph: Does it appear almost like a broken off piece of stone or a fragment from a building?

Lucia: Yes, indeed, a fragment. They are all leftover fragments from the quarries. And I prefer to maintain the rough outside and to make an opening where you can see through. That’s why they are called Windows. And I polish the inside. It’s also like my point of view that the inside is more important than the outside, not only in sculpture, but also in the persons.

Joseph: Have you always been working with ideas around touch and texture in your sculpture?

Lucia: Yeah, from the beginning, I’ve always tried to emphasise the touching and to invite people to touch and feel the differences.

Joseph: Thank you so much, Lucia, for introducing us to your artwork and giving us an insight into your practice.

Lucia: Well, my pleasure, Joe. Thank you for this interview.

[Music]

Stop 6. Track 2.
Lucia Beijlsmit – Windows Series

There are four ventanas, or windows, positioned throughout the first two rooms of the exhibition. Each sculpture is the size of an inverted wicker basket. They are mounted on dark grey plinths, surrounded by darker grey, almost black carpets. If you step onto the carpets, you can touch the windows, or even look through them, because they act like frames for other artworks in the exhibition.

You will encounter one window in the first exhibition space. It is made from a wedge-shaped piece of white marble, delicately veined with pale grey. The block of marble is unfinished apart from two flat, smooth sides, and the hand-sized window carved straight through it. The texture of the unfinished marble is crystalline, like the walls of a cave or a pile of salt, and it sparkles as the light catches it. It looks as though it might flake away, but the surface is absolutely solid. The window carved through the middle follows the shape of the stone, like a teardrop. The window opening is incredibly smooth, and it has small steps carved into it. This window evokes a Mediterranean building, perhaps on a Greek island, white stone bathed in sunshine against a blue sky.

In the second room of the exhibition there are three more windows. The middle of these is directly opposite the window with steps in the first gallery, and the two windows frame each other. The window is carved into an anvil-shaped block of marble that has the thick texture of clotted cream, or perhaps a crumbly cheese, and is veined in deep reds and blacks almost the colour of blood, as though the marble has been bleeding internally. If we are thinking about food, and the first window is a block of salt crystals, then this window is like raspberry ripple ice cream. The sides of the sculpture are flat and polished, and the window is rounder in this sculpture, with a more pronounced frame around it than the first.

The third window is the colour of a peach and strawberry yoghurt, a delicate sunrise pink, and is shaped like a jagged tooth. The surface of the marble is not even: the back of the sculpture is partly covered in a rough, grey, stony layer like uncut slate or the outside of an oyster shell. The smoothness of the window opening, this time a gothic arch, and the peachy pink stone feel like the inside of the shell, pearly and inviting. You can feel a pull through its smooth surface, like water through rocks, drawing you to slide your hand across the sill and through the window. From one side, the sculpture frames the work in the third exhibition space, and from the other direction it frames the glowing Fire Flowers in the first space.

The final window is to the right. It is carved from a solid, square sandstone block with a rough, granular texture – more cake than ice cream. The marble of the other three sculptures is the result of geological processes trapping impurities in calcium carbonate. In this sculpture, you can feel the ancient grains of silica – space dust – that formed the block. The shape is much more regular than the other three windows, almost as though it was made of old, crumbling concrete, and the window through the sandstone block evokes a medieval church, missing its stained glass. The surface is alive with the mottled white and orange of lichens, and radiating out from the window are carved lines, chiselled into the rough surface. This window frames Jennifer Justice’s Bucket of Rain on the opposite wall, as though you are watching a shower of rain through the window.

End of Stop 6, Track 2.

Stop 7.

Hi, I’m Collin van Uchelen. I am a conceptual artist and pyrotechnician based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

This is an audio description of some of my works from Project Fire Flower 2021, which are on display in the Beyond the Visual. There are four tactile firework panels. These are engraved square acrylic panels, which depict a firework shell burst pattern or effect.

The engravings are illuminated and they can be traced through touch, and they show you the trajectories of light that are created by a fireworks moving stars. And it’s this movement and the streaks of light that follow the stars that give a firework shell its characteristic shape and form. It might last only mere seconds at most. In some ways, the panels will have the visual appearance of a long exposure photograph of a firework shell burst that shows all these streaks of light as capturing the movement of the stars over time. On the wall are four panels from left to right, Chrysanthemum, Comets, Dahlia and Willow. Each of these is named in a way that reflects the characteristic firework shape that the panel represents.

Listen to the audio description for each panel using the headphones attached to the individual works.

[Music]

Stop 8.

This artwork is Pass Away by Serafina Min, made in 2025. The objects that the artist has made are placed inside an opaque box and are hidden from gallery visitors. The only way to experience the artwork is through the following audio description, recorded by the artist to explain the reasons why. It’ll take about 12 minutes to listen to.

Hello, I hope you’re having a good day. My name is Serafina Min. It’s very good to meet you. I am an artist and educator, an art teacher at a school in London for blind and visually impaired students.

Today, I am going to show you three deaths made with wax. I will guide you through how wax remembers to die. This was inspired by one of my former students. Not so long ago in South Korea, a student who was born blind came to the classroom one day and asked, “Teacher, what is death?” I had thought that I was prepared for the day, but not for this question. You see, the student had recently lost a family member. He told me, I asked other adults and they said, “Death is when you can’t see or feel someone anymore. But I’m blind. I can’t see anyone. And I can only feel someone when they come close.”

Every child deserves honesty. Not harsh, but truthful. So I began to explain. “When you die, your heart stops. Your blood stops circulating. Your brain stops receiving oxygen.” But I saw the question still on his face. So instead, I started to explain. “You know how in Korean, we say, 돌아가셨다, which means someone has gone back or returned. Well, in English, people say someone has passed away. In other languages, they say someone went up or down or began smelling flowers from underneath.”

And as I went on, the student became quiet, head up, thinking. And I thought of a line from The Little Prince published in 1943, which goes, ”What is essential is invisible to the eye”.

Inside this vitrine before you, 26cm high, 44 wide, 36 deep, there are three deaths.

The first is to pass away.
The second is to fall away.
The third is to return.

Each is made of wax, a material that is both temporal and eternal. It’s a material that remembers. It melts. Softens. Loses its shape with heat. And when it cools, it finds its form again. These three depths are made from wax that has lived other lives. Melted, reformed. Reborn from the remains of my earlier works. Three small reincarnations.

The first death is to pass away. It’s an expression found in languages including English and Portuguese. Imagine a small rectangle of black wax. 14 by 18 cm, like a night sky that fits into your hands. Its surface is restless. It bears the traces of touch and time. Small holes. Uneven marks. These marks are not carved, but happened. Made by raindrops falling on still warm wax by moments that touched and passed.

Then across the black surface, a long, deliberate dent runs diagonally upward. Like the echo of a path once taken. A place where something once moved and now is gone. The edge of a memory. Slight as the breath of a bird.

In the lower left corner of the night sky stands a figure. Two curved blue shells stacked one above the other. Held upright by a dark column. The shells are smooth and cold to touch. Their surface is milky translucent like breath on glass. Inside the upper shell, small beads rest, some white, some blue, and a few particles so bright they seem to hold light not as a flash but as a pulse, like warmth moving across the fingertips, or the quiet shimmer of air felt layered where light becomes touch. If you could touch it, you might roll one of these tiny beads along the dent, let it move, roll, drag, then stop.

That small gesture, that quiet pause, is what it means to pass away, a small re-enactment of passing away. In that motion, loss becomes gesture, and gesture becomes a way of remembering that even what disappears leaves a mark. Something leaves, something lingers.

The second death is to fall away, an expression found in Nordic languages including Danish and Icelandic. It began as a solid block, heavy, certain, complete. Over time it softened. The surface trembled, peeled, fell away from itself. Was it collapsing inward, or reaching out toward the world beyond its own edges?

The air below thickened, damp and heavy with change. Each layer seemed to hesitate, not breaking, but loosening, as if remembering what it means to yield. Now at its centre sits a dark green sphere, smooth, but punctured by small openings. Around it, layers of rough wax fold outward, curling like skin loosening, after a long bath.

Some parts have wrinkled, edges expanding. Soft ridges where they once were. From the spherical body, colder, pale green extend. Twist. Reach. Seems to hover between falling and becoming. Caught in that fragile moment just before descent. If you were to hold it, you might feel the edges flake slightly under your fingers.

The sphere remembers its shell. The shell remembers what it held. Each fracture, each gap, is the record of release. Their dark outlines drifting in the slow, sleepy rhythm. Towards the very bottom, you’d be surrounded by fallen shapes simply allowed to be. This is how you shape a creature made of wetness and memory. Not immense, but enough to hold the archaeology. And if you listen closely, this death, despite everything falling and collapsing does not sound like destruction, but like one long, quiet exhale.

The third death is to return. As they say in South Korea and Kazakhstan. This death rests in a gentle curve. An amber arc of a colour close to my skin. About the size of my hand cupped. It bends almost into a circle, but not quite. There’s a breadth of space left open. From one end rises a branching of blue wax. Thin, delicate, trembling, as if caught mid-breath. If touched, it rocks back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth. Then settles.

Motion between falling and stillness. Between departure and return. A small, quiet negotiation with gravity. In this small landscape, gravity is memory. Once it might have been whole, stable and unmoving. But over time, it became a being that understood motion. It learned how to leave. And it learned how to come back. It did not resist motion. Nor did it chase it. It simply learned to move without leaving to rest without ending.

Trace the curve with your finger. It slopes downwards. Then rises again. Then splits into smaller, blue lines. At the ends of the lines. Tiny wax fears wait. Each one a quiet stop. A quiet drop. A pause in motion. There is a saying in Afrikaans for death. One stopped quietly. Sometimes, the being would lean as far as it could, until the edge of its world met the table, and then, with a faint sigh, it would come back. Always, it came back. Not because it feared falling, but because it understood that returning was a way of continuing.

To return is not to repeat, but to come back changed. Each sculpture you have heard, to pass away, to fall away, to return, holds death, not as an absence, but as a gesture.

[Music]

Stop 9. Track 1.

Joseph: Hello, my name is Joseph Rizzo Naudi. I’m a blind writer and I’m here with David Johnson, one of the artists exhibiting at the Beyond the Visual exhibition. Thank you so much for joining me, David.

David: Hi there, Joseph. Thank you for having me.

Joseph: So we’re going to give people listening a sense of your artwork, the artwork that you’re exhibiting at the exhibition. And I’m wondering what people will find when they enter the gallery space and come across your work.

David: So I am presenting two pieces in the show. One of them consists of a table, a large rectangular modernist table. It’ll be surrounded by four stools of the same style and visitors will be invited to sit at the table on the stool and under the table. They will find a series of silicon facsimile pieces of discarded chewing gum. Perfectly clean, but very similar to the lumps of chewing gum we all find under tables and chairs in public places.

These lumps of chewing gum, lookalike chewing gum, are laid out in such a way as to present the kind of pattern. And in fact there will be braille pattern under those as well. A braille word. The dots will make up a braille word in what they call grade two braille, which is where some of the word is put into kind of shorthand form. And that word is the name of the piece, which is ‘inhibition’. Because the whole piece is about inhibited art. It’s about hiding it rather than exhibiting it. It’s out of sight. It’s invisible, inhibited and only available to touch.

Joseph: Thanks very much, David, for those introductions to your works. Could you give us a sense of your practice and how these artworks fit into it?

David: I’ve had over thirty years with no vision at all. What I find quite interesting is that I revived my art practice after I lost my sight. In my childhood and my teens, I was a very keen artist. Art was a very important part of my life. I went to art college after I left school for a year. Then my sight at that point was beginning to go quite quickly. So I stopped my artwork at that point.

Though I was totally blind, I found that art making and thinking about art and going to many audio description events designed for blind people, visually impaired people, brought to me a connection with the visual in a very powerful way, which was to me very surprising and very thrilling, very much part of what played into my sort of revived interest in art making. And all my work now is three-dimensional or tactile or sonic in character. Through those other ways of making art, I reconnect with the visual in a very strong way.

I suppose it’s like the unusual aspect that a lot of my works present, taking very normal and everyday objects and placing them in very unusual or extraordinary either context or scales of presentation.

Joseph: David Johnson, thank you so much for taking us through your artworks and a little bit into your practice.

David: Thank you, Joe. It’s been very rewarding for me to be given the opportunity to talk about them.

[Music]

Stop 9. Track 2.
David Johnson, Inhibition: Beyond the doubt of a shadow 2025

A table and four stools, like you might encounter in a café. The table and stools have black linoleum tops, and polished bent plywood legs. It’s a very ordinary situation, but perhaps unexpected in a gallery. You might walk past and think ‘Why is this here?’ ‘Is it an artwork?’ ‘Can I sit at this table?’ We momentarily forget that this is an exhibition that overturns the convention ‘do not touch’. An architect or design nerd might recognise that the table and stools were designed by the Finnish modernist architect Alvar Aalto in the 1930s. But this wouldn’t explain ‘why’ it is here.

This is clever; it plays on our expectations of behaviour in a gallery. And then, if you do sit down, you start to feel under the table, to the surface that even non-blind people can’t see. But they can touch. What are these things underneath? There are lumps that feel squidgy. Chewing gum? Urgh! It’s like being back at school. Is this the art piece?

In fact, they are made of silicon, but being pink and white they resemble – and more importantly, feel like – chewing gum. Little stalactites on the underside of the table. The artist is playing games with us, surely, evoking memories. And while the bits of discarded ‘chewing gum’ form a kind of irregular pattern towards the edge of the table, if we delve further under, into the shadows, we might – if nudged – recognise that the lumps form characters of an over-sized braille. And the braille, we are told (because even the braille readers amongst us struggle to decode the message), spells out the word ‘inhibition’. A kind of hidden language. Which, of course, braille is, even for many people registered blind. And the artist, as a braille user, enjoys the perversity of an oversize braille that echoes the initial refusal of the object to be ‘read’ as art.

Now everybody’s feeling underneath the table, and the work has become a kind of performance piece. It gathers people together, as a place to sit in little groups, to rest and exchange ideas and share experiences, even with complete strangers. We are accidently touching each other’s fingers whilst reaching under the table, which is both funny and awkward. Inhibitions are being challenged in the shadows. The artist is using ordinary, everyday things that go unnoticed, but making them extra-ordinary. As some of us know, if you rely on touch to find your way to a table, you have to feel for where the edge of the table is, and, through proximity, where your stool is relative to the table, which often involves touching the underneath of tables more than a sighted person would. Lifting the stools to move closer, to feel that proximity, we begin to notice that each stool has a lump of chewing gum between each of their curved plywood legs.

If you can get over that initial revulsion, you keep wanting to press and deform the silicon lumps. And while the fact that it is a facsimile of chewing gum takes away the retch-reflex, it does engage memories of school desks, doesn’t it? And it has a multisensory aspect we haven’t talked about yet. The smell, oh yes, the smell. I thought I smelled something. So what is that smell? It’s kind of minty.

End of Stop 9, Track 2.

Stop 10. Track 1.

Joseph: Hello, my name is Joseph Rizzo Naudi. I’m a blind writer and I’m joined by Jennifer Justice, who is one of the artists exhibiting at the Beyond the Visual exhibition. Hello, Jennifer.

Jennifer: Hello.

Joseph: What I’d like to do in this conversation with you, Jennifer, is give the listeners a sense of your artwork. So what is this?

Jennifer: So the piece in the exhibition is called Bucket of Rain and it’s a sculptural mobile. And it’s raindrops suspended from an iron spout that cascade down towards the floor. So it’s a vertically oriented piece, like sort of like a shower, like the water coming out of your shower. And at the top is a reclaimed iron spout from an old wine crushing barn. So this is a very heavy iron spout. And then attached to that are these long, sinuous, smooth chains with raindrops at the ends at varying heights. And there the raindrops are all made of wood. And you can put your hands under the water, the stream of water to interact with it.

Joseph: So if I reached out and touched it, what I would encounter would be tiny wooden raindrops suspended by, I imagine, very fine chains. Is that right?

Jennifer: Yes. Actually, the raindrops are quite large compared to what we consider, you know, in-real-life raindrops. The largest one is a little larger than a pear. And the smallest one is a little larger than a peanut.

Joseph: I had a question about the colour of the woods.

Jennifer: Yeah, they’re different colours, more sort of like from a pale yellow to a really dark brown for the walnut.

Joseph: And will they make a sound when they’re sort of moved together like a mobile would?

Jennifer: A very whispery, quiet sound. Yeah. It’s like the quietest wind chimes ever.

Joseph: And could you tell us a little bit about your practice and where this artwork comes from?

Jennifer: These days, my work is very much concerned with our notions of public and shared space. And that’s risen from my work in accessibility as a disabled person. How much of our public spaces are not designed for beyond a very narrow range of idealised human beings? So I’m finding myself making these speculative material meditations that draw on public history and ruralism and climate change. And all the debates concerning the use of our public lands. And I grew up in rural North Alabama with low vision and some hearing loss. And now I live in rural Mendocino County. I would say these places are both blessed with really with a ton of natural beauty, natural resources. But they’re both they were also both very limiting in some ways. I consider them both transportation deserts. So there’s limited resources here for disabled people like public transportation and community engagement. That’s really forward thinking community engagement for disabled people.

So my work is very multimedia. I make sculptures and paintings. And I also write and I make 3D tactile models and maps to document the performative improvisational aspects of living. And trying to create community in these spaces that are very, very often inaccessible. I think that touches upon logical conversations and post-colonial conversations. So I’m excited when that overlap happens also.

Joseph: Jennifer Justice, thank you so much for introducing us to your artwork. I can’t wait to encounter it in the exhibition.

Jennifer: Thank you. It was a pleasure to speak with you today.

[Music]

Stop 10. Track 2.
Jennifer Justice, Bucket of Rain 2021

An ancient, rusty hoop hangs down on wires, suspended from brackets high up on the gallery wall. The hoop looks as though it might be part of some old farming equipment, maybe the rim or spout of something larger, but whatever it was attached to is long gone, corroded away by rust. And it is so rusty it is marking the white gallery wall as it brushes against it.

The hoop is tilted at an angle, and pouring from it are beaded chains of varying lengths that are looped around its edge. The chains are also rusty to different degrees, as though they could all be different ages. They are subtly different sizes and weights, some very fine like keyring chains, others feel more sturdy. You can run your fingers through the chains as though running your hands through long hair. At the end of each chain is suspended a wooden droplet, maybe ten in all, and they are all different. Imagine carrying a very full bucket, so heavy that the water is sloshing over the sides while you try to keep it level. Or maybe a shower.

The artist has used many different kinds of wood to make the raindrops, which are polished to such smoothness that you can barely feel their differences in texture. Cherry, maple, walnut, pecan: fruit woods of exceptional quality that sound delicious. The colours range from dark browns, warm tans to ochres. Every drop has a unique form. The largest drop, which is right at the centre of the arrangement, is the size and shape of a pear, with an intricate surface pattern that is covered in veins and watermarks. It’s as though the pear had been left at the bottom of a schoolbag for some time, and it’s the only drop on which you can feel any trace of roughness to the wood.

The drops made of darker wood are all more elongated shapes, like stylised teardrops that have been stretched out, and are less uniform in shape than those made of paler wood. One has a second drop emerging from it, forming itself like the globules in a lava lamp. Another has a little drip emerging from its base, like a baby raindrop being born. The drops made from paler wood are rounder rather than longer and are smaller but heavier. The tiniest drop hangs from the longest chain, reaching about waist height, if you are standing.

The sculpture has the feeling of an old, beaded curtain, or perhaps a dream catcher with the round hoop and the falling chains. The drops on their chains are like multiple plumb lines or fishing lures hanging down the wall. As you run your hands through the chains and their droplets, the sound they make as they connect with one another is quiet and gentle, like the beginning of a summer shower. The faint shadow that the sculpture casts on the gallery wall is evocative of rain running down a window pane.

End of Stop 10, Track 2.

Stop 11.

Hello, I’m Ken Wilder, an artist and writer and co-curator of the exhibition Beyond the Visual.

Just behind you is my work Pendulum, specially commissioned for this exhibition. It is a rotating object suspended from the ceiling, about 90 centimetres high and 48 centimetres in diameter at its widest. It is tethered by a chain that attaches the object to a low circular plinth. Like a child’s wooden stacking toy, it is made from alternating plywood rings and cogs, wide at the centre and narrow top and bottom. It is painted in cyan, magenta and yellow.

You can touch the work and gently spin it in one direction until the chain restricts further rotations. But the object has a flip character when spun at speed, when it cannot be touched.

This is revealed by the accompanying auto-described film on your right, which can be listened to using the headphones attached to the TV screen.

When spun rapidly, the colour appears as uniform grey due to colour mixing resulting from limitations of vision when perceiving rapidly rotating objects. The film explains the colour science behind this phenomenon.

On occasions throughout the exhibition, gallery staff will ask you to step safely back while they demonstrate the object spinning like a child’s spinning top.

[Music]

Stop 12. Track 1.

Joseph: Hello, my name is Joseph Rizzo Naudi. I’m a blind writer and I’m joined today by Sam Metz, who is one of the exhibiting artists in the Beyond the Visual exhibition. Hello, Sam.

Sam: Hi.

Joseph: We’re going to try and give the listeners a sense of your artwork as it appears in the exhibition. What would you say is there? What’s in front of us?

Sam: So the thing that you will encounter is a plywood sculpture. It’s a low ground sculpture, about the size and height of your average coffee table. It’s about 1.2 metres in diameter. There are three layers of plywood. The top layer is the largest, which you can think of as a disc, and then the one below is slightly smaller, and then the one below that is smaller still. And it forms the shape, if you imagine a sphere cut in half and the lower hemisphere, the sections of the plywood in a modular way form the shape of a hemisphere. And the work can be tipped and rocked back and forth, and there’s wire strung through it. And on the wire are these small washers that vibrate along the wire as you tip and rock it. But it’s in a very subtle way that allows feedback to come through to the body.

Joseph: Is the sculpture mounted on the floor or is it on like a kind of plinth?

Sam: No, quite recklessly, it is directly on the floor. So the title of the work is called Ciliated Sense. And if we think of cilia, it might be like hairs that you get on the back of your hand. So this idea with small amounts of vibration kind of extending out into the environment. So that’s hopefully what you’ll encounter when you touch the work or engage with it.

Joseph: Ciliated Sense.

Sam: Yes.

Joseph: Okay. I’m imagining like a sundial, but instead of there just being one metal bit on the sundial, they’re actually 10 and they’re all radiating out from the centre. So it’s like this kind of triple decker…

Sam: Sundial. Yes.

Joseph: Triple-decker sundial. Is there anything else that it sort of reminds you of?

Sam: Kind of play equipment that you might see in a park and the way that it tips back and forth and the way that it spins. And it was originally designed for Tourette’s Hero and for a play event based on an archive of a disabled person’s experience of a wheelchair user moving through space and in a dip in concrete. And they would move back and forth and kind of draw flowers through a puddle, which was really interesting to me. So I then, once I gave them the work to them, I wanted to recreate it to enhance the feedback you get from engaging with it. How can I add more sensory feedback through the work?

Joseph: I’m imagining that some of the wires on the metal wires. Could you describe what that sounds like?

Sam: It’s kind of a little bit grating. So some of the wires are zither wires. So I’m not a musician, but I got some advice. And so the pitch of that is kind of higher as the washers run across it and then others are just kind of guitar wires which have like little almost indents on them I guess so that when the washer moves up and down um it makes more kind of rolling repetitive sounds I would guess. So because every time the work is moved by someone engaging with it, it creates a new pattern, so if you imagine the wire the washer is moving along the wire and sits in a different place for the next person engaging with it.

Joseph: I really like this idea of each visitor coming to the work after someone else has been there and almost like the experience of that other visitor is left on the sculpture and then they in turn leave their own mark on it in terms of how it sounds.

Sam: Yeah, I really like that too. It’s as you say like a trace of a previous visitor but then maybe becomes like a constellation of different interactions.

Joseph: And I’m thinking about how it will feel to the touch you said it was plywood can you tell us a little bit about how that’s been finished and how it might feel to touch the sculpture?

Sam: Yeah, so the top surface is really lightly oiled so you probably won’t pick that up on your fingertips. It will just feel like bare wood, but along the edges I’ve varnished it, it will be smooth around the edges of the wood which are like eight mile thick and then so if you kind of push your hand all the way to the centre, you would interrupt a wire at some point. So I’ve just painted yellow bands in three of those segments just around the edge to help people to kind of know where’s okay to touch. I mean everywhere’s okay to touch really but I just didn’t want anyone kind of like hurting the hand on the guitar wire.

Joseph: So how does this sculpture fit in with your practice in general, Sam?

Sam: It’s an extension of my existing work is how I describe it, so I’ve previously created work that explore movement and the body and I’ve previously made work that looks at questioning the hierarchies of sensory modalities particularly considering vision and suggesting that it shouldn’t always be primary but this work allows me to combine both of them, I would say. So I’m exploring this idea of having a porous body so like a really highly sensitised body, a neurodivergent body in engagement with the world and I’m also looking at how this connects to having low vision I think, it’s quite an interesting conversation to have.

Joseph: Thank you so much Sam for introducing us to your artwork and telling us a bit about your practice.

Sam: Thank you very much, it’s been lovely chatting to you.

[Music]

Stop 12. Track 2.
Sam Metz, Ciliated Sense 2025

A giant fighting spinning top. A tactile clock. A radial city plan from a fantasy novel. A playground roundabout. A spiderweb. A rattling maze with a ball bearing coursing through it. A game I don’t know how to win. An alien musical instrument.

Ciliated Sense is a hemisphere that is somehow made of angled planes. Although the object has the appearance of a large ball cut not quite in half – but below its midline – it is in fact made entirely of straight lines and flat planes. Like an abandoned parasol that has blown over in the wind, it rests at a shallow angle on the floor in the corner of the gallery.

It is made from pale plywood that looks untreated apart from yellow areas on the top layer, the same colour as a highlighter pen, that indicate the best places to push the structure. It appears to have been assembled like flat pack furniture, held together in tension by wires of varying thickness. Ten intersecting radial spines support three horizontal planes that together describe the geometry of the implied hemisphere, like longitudinal and latitudinal planes of a transparent globe cut off somewhere below the equator.

The invitation to touch offers an extra dimension both with sound and movement. The angles at its base mean that the structure can wobble but not fall over. It seems to be weighted so that it rights itself when you push down on the highlighted sections, and it always returns to the same position, leaning to one side. And the noise! Harsh, metallic, like a toolbox falling over and scattering its contents. Strung through the structure there are wires of varying thickness. Some are thin and high pitched. Others, towards the centre of the structure, are thicker – guitar strings maybe. The strings have washers of different sizes threaded onto them that clatter around as you move the object. Some are small and look as though they would be useful but others are so large it’s hard to imagine what they might be for. You can move them individually to make different sounds. Different types of string make different sounds as the washers bounce and scrape along them – aliens, clangers, or the sounds from a tool shed. When you tip the whole structure the noise becomes louder. Are they pleasant sounds? Maybe not.

The position of the sculpture in the corner, in the middle of a carpeted area, might make you think of a playground, as though you’re approaching a roundabout on a safe, soft surface to kneel or sit on. But the object itself is not soft at all, more like a wooden model for a tank or an armoured vehicle fashioned in Da Vinci’s workshop.

End of Stop 12, Track 2.

Stop 13. Track 1.

Joseph: Hello, my name is Joseph Rizzo Naudi. I’m a blind writer and I’m joined today by Aaron McPeake, who’s one of the exhibiting artists at the Beyond the Visual exhibition.

Joseph: Hello, Aaron.

Aaron: Hello, Joe.

Joseph: So what I’d like us to do is give people listening a sense of your artwork. What is it that we’re going to find?

Aaron: Well, there are two installations. One of the installations is titled Rings. And basically, this is five rings. These are bell bronze pieces. They vary in size from, you know, 9, 10 centimetres in diameter up to about 75 centimetres. They resemble wedding rings, but also there is the idea that they ring when they’re struck. Their bells are gongs and each of them have clappers.

They’re hanging from a large beam, which will be suspended from the roof of the gallery. So they’re kind of hung in a cone configuration. If you imagine an ice cream cone, but rather than as it would be held in your hand with the largest ring at the top and the smallest ring at the bottom. If you turn that 90 degrees, the cone will be hanging in space.

Now, these can be struck with the clappers and rung like bells or gongs. And each one has its own. And each one has its own unique sound. And the metal that they’re made from, which is bell bronze, 80% copper, 20% tin. When it’s handled, it reacts with the oils in one’s hand or the oils in one’s skin and leaves a scent. So this works visual. It’s haptic. It changes temperature, if you hold on to it longer. It’s sonic. It’s vibratory. It’s with the sound element. And then there’s also the smell element.

Joseph: Are the rings smooth to the touch or do they have sort of texture on them?

Aaron: The overall surface is smooth. But because there’ll be this porosity, what you’ll get is pits, little holes, especially with the larger pieces. There’s much more porosity in the castings. But I don’t mind that.

Joseph: And how would you describe the sound that the rings make?

Aaron: There’s somewhere between a bell and a gong.

Joseph: And is it the case that the larger ring will have a deeper tone and the smaller one will have a higher pitch tone?

Aaron: Yes. I like the uniqueness of the bells. Each one has a unique sound.

Joseph: And could you tell us a bit about how these artworks fit into your practice more generally?

Aaron: Well, I’m really interested in the senses or how neglected the senses are. We don’t teach listening except to musicians or mechanical engineers. You know, touching, proprioception, kinesthesia, that’s something for dancers. And even looking, I mean, speak to most postgraduate art students and they don’t know why the sky is blue or how the eye works. So the senses are really neglected.

And also, historically, the senses have been thought of in isolation. There’s sight, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, when in fact they all work in concert. So for me, the idea of these works is that they can be engaged with on many levels, as well as thematically. They can be engaged with physically on lots of levels.

Joseph: Thank you so much, Aaron, for taking us through your artwork and giving us a detailed insight into your practice.

Aaron: Thanks very much, Joe.

[Music]

Stop 13. Track 2.
Aaron McPeake, Rings 2025

Rings by Aaron McPeake consists of five bronze rings of different sizes suspended from a wooden beam above our heads, which is about 3m long and protrudes horizontally from the gallery wall.

The five rings are hung from the wooden beam in order of size, with the largest at the wall end of the beam. This largest ring is roughly the size of a bass drum or round dustbin lid. The rings get progressively smaller until the smallest ring is the size of a bracelet that could fit around your wrist. The whole structure appears quite precarious: the bronze rings look very heavy and the wooden beam seems to be supporting a lot of weight. Yet despite this, the rings appear as if they are floating in mid air: they are suspended from the wooden beam by strong but fine white cords, which are almost invisible against the white of the gallery walls.

Though varied in size, the rings are all the same shape: flat and rather broad, like a simple wedding band. Their surfaces have a golden sheen to them, but their finish is not even or perfectly polished. Their texture varies, and all have the marks of their making process across the surfaces, so that you can feel pits and bumps all over them. In some places, especially on the larger rings, you can feel the marks from where the molten metal was poured into moulds to create the shape. The rings are made of bell bronze. This results in a surprising variation of colour, much paler than the dark brown of conventional bronze sculptures. This is because of different quantities of copper and tin in the metal alloy. This gives some of the rings a milky appearance, similar to a new brass padlock, while others have traces of rusty red on their interior. There is no way of telling the age of the rings: combined with the rustic appearance of the wooden beam they’re suspended from, they could be ancient, and wouldn’t look out of place in a historical museum.

Viewed along their length, the rings form concentric circles, extending like a telescope, or a model of planets in the solar system. Looking through the centre of the smallest ring towards the wall, the rings suddenly appear to be the same size but changing the angle of sight makes them appear like ripples on a pond, or a cartoon depiction of sound waves.

Alongside the rings there are two small wooden hammers that slot into brackets on the gallery wall. These can be used to strike the rings to listen to the different tones they make. The largest ring sounds like a church bell, deep and sonorous, as though the sound is echoing through a valley. Striking the rings has a ritualistic quality, as if the sound is calling people to worship or meditate. The smallest ring has a sound more like a school bell. In between, there is something a little deceptive, because some of the smaller rings have deeper tones than larger rings, which is unexpected. The sound quality depends on a lot of different factors: the kind of alloy the rings are made of, whether they are struck with the hard or soft edges of the hammer, and whether they are struck on the edge or in the middle of the ring.

The vibrations from the largest ring last for some time and can be felt for many seconds if the ring is struck hard. If you place your ear close to the rings you might be able to sense the vibrations also travelling through the other rings, so that each bell affects the others around it. The rings are initially cold to the touch, but the metal warms slightly the longer you hold it. The metal will react with oils on the skin, leaving a metallic smell behind. If you stand in the gallery long enough while the bells are being struck, you might even be able to taste the metallic smell, as if you’ve been sucking on an old penny.

End of Stop 13, Track 2.

Stop 14. Track 1.

Joseph: Hello, my name is Joseph Rizzo Naudi. I’m a blind writer and I’m joined today by Aaron McPeake, who’s one of the exhibiting artists at the Beyond the Visual exhibition. Hello, Aaron.

Aaron: Hello, Joe.

Joseph: So what I’d like us to do is give people listening a sense of your artwork. What is it that we’re going to find?

Aaron: It’s a series of works called Icelandic Landscapes. These are bell bronze pieces. I call them paintings, though there is no pigment or paint involved. They are kind of creations mimicking lava fields or volcanic landscapes. It is basically using the same material as bell bronze and pouring it into an open mould. And as it freezes, it leaves flow lines and oxidisation occurs, giving a kind of topographical landscape nature, which is what the intention was to copy a kind of Google Earth of a lava field. These also can be touched and sounded by ringing, you know, with one’s knuckles.

Joseph: And do you have a sense of how they will be displayed in the space?

Aaron: Yeah, these will be wall hung, like as paintings would be, but they’re hung on brackets. They sit away from the wall and they can hang freely. When they’re touched or rung or tapped, they’re not going to knock against the wall. They’re free to move so they can produce a little bit of sound.

Joseph: And they’re all sort of landscape orientation?

Aaron: Yes.

Joseph: And are they all the same size?

Aaron: No, they’re varying sizes. They range from around 50 centimetres in width down to about 20 centimetres.

Joseph: And what’s it like to touch them?

Aaron: There is a sort of a rough surface that varies depending on the part of the image that one’s looking at or touching. And the flow lines, so the liquid of the metal is moving in a very particular direction. And it mimics the lava fields. So you have these flowing rivers of lava that suddenly stop when the temperature drops. And they freeze. But they freeze in particular lines of streams. The same thing is true of glaciers, that you have these actual shapes of masses of ice and rock that are moving in directions.

Joseph: And could you say a little bit about the colour?

Aaron: They’re quite variable. Some of them are various hues of black, grey, charcoal, and then others have reds and yellows within. Now again, this is very much about the making process, in that the oxidisation differs depending on the air temperature of the day, the humidity of the air of the day, the geological history of the sand that I’m using to make the mould, something that’s way beyond my capacity or budget to investigate further exactly what’s happening on a microchemistry level.

Joseph: Thank you so much, Aaron, for taking us through your artwork and giving us a detailed insight into your practice.

Aaron: Thanks very much, Joe.

[Music]

Stop 14. Track 2.
Aaron McPeake, Icelandic Landscapes 2007-24

Icelandic Landscapes by Aaron McPeake is a series of four bronze panels, each with a distinct surface texture, that are suspended a little distance from the wall on large hooks. Each panel is roughly the size of an A3 sheet of paper. The surfaces resemble topographical maps with bumps, craters and imperfections suggesting an aerial view of different landscapes. The four, dark-coloured panels are mounted in a line along the white gallery wall, a little like a 35mm film negative strip.

Taking the panels from left to right, the first panel is the thickest of the four. It has a deep, sonorous tone if you tap it with your knuckles, and you can feel the vibrations for a long time afterwards. This panel is the only one with smooth edges, although the surface is wrinkled and folded due to the pouring and cooling processes. It has patches of rusty red colour at its centre, with darker brown and black towards the edges. It brings to mind an erupting volcano, with the fiery red flowing down and cooling in the dark lava field around it. There are five small holes in the panel, almost like bullet holes, roughly the size of a pencil.

The second panel is more uneven around the edges. The colour of this panel is mottled grey, with patches of the bronze metal showing through. The areas of bare bronze are smooth, and the rest of the panel is rougher, almost sharp to the touch. The kind of landscape we might be looking down on is somewhere quite desolate and featureless, like a desert. There are holes and imperfections on its surface but far fewer than any of the other panels.

The third panel is far less solid than the first two, with large, irregular holes and craters that look as though the metal has been eaten away in places, like a rusty car door that’s been sat in a scrapyard. The white of the wall shows through behind the holes, and the surface colour is comprised of greens and browns, with areas of slate grey. If this were an aerial view the landscape could be a forest and lakes, or a coastal area. But the surface is also quite alien, like a lunar landscape with craters. Maybe this isn’t something viewed from high up, maybe it’s actually something very small seen through a microscope, like bacteria or amoeba, stretching and multiplying.

The fourth and final panel feels like the weightiest of the series. It has a dark, mottled surface of blacks and browns and deep bronze, covered in craggy lumps. There is a small hole towards the bottom left that suggests the mouth of a cave, with jagged walls on all sides. If this were a landscape, it’d be a mountainous terrain, all jagged peaks and underground caverns.

The different textures and colours on the surfaces of the panels are the result of different conditions encountered during the process of casting and cooling molten bronze, which would have been poured into the moulds. Cooling the metal quickly creates ripples and wrinkles, and can cause air bubbles to expand and explode, leading to holes and craters in the surface. Changing the air temperature and humidity during the process can cause reactions that turn the metal dark brown or black. Different quantities of other metals in the composition of the bronze, as well as the sand used to make the mould, can cause wide variations in surface colour. The way that the metal will respond is difficult to predict, and the artist never knows what the end result will be.

End of Stop 14, Track 2.

Stop 15. Track 1.

Joseph: Hello, my name is Joseph Rizzo Naudi. I’m a blind writer and I’m joined today by Lenka Clayton, who’s one of the exhibiting artists in the Beyond the Visual exhibition. Hello, Lenka.

Lenka: Hey, Joseph. So nice to meet you and get to talk to you.

Joseph: Thank you so much for joining us.

Lenka: You’re welcome.

Joseph: I would love to give the listeners a sense of your artwork. What is it that people will experience when they walk into the gallery and encounter your piece in this show?

Lenka: So the piece that I’m showing in Beyond the Visual is called Sculpture for the Blind by the Blind. In the middle of the area, there would be three tabletops. And then on top of those tables are nine white sculptural forms. They’re between the size of a spaghetti squash and a sleeping small dog. They’re made of plaster. They’re waxed. There’s also going to be a braille sign on the wall that can be read by touch. That is a description of the sculptures that you’re looking at.

And there’s also going to be a photograph on the wall of a sculpture by Constantine Brâncuși called Sculpture for the Blind.

Joseph: Can you give us a brief description of that photograph?

Lenka: They’re white and they’re marble. They’re abstracted forms that resemble heads, eggs, spheres, something in that realm. They’re displayed inside a museum vitrine. The middle one is a sculpture called Sculpture for the Blind.

The reasons that this project began, that I made this work, is that I came across this sculpture, Sculpture for the Blind, in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. And I’m a sighted person. I could see the sculpture and I could see that it was in this big glass case. And when I heard the title, there was something extraordinary that it suggested to me that it was a sculpture titled for the blind, but it was displayed permanently in a way that it was completely inaccessible to anybody who would identify as blind. And this little bit of confused logic, where the logic of the museum kind of came up against the logic of the artist, who named this very poetic title and the logic of the museum is to keep this as safe as possible. These two different logics collided and made this kind of absurd moment in reality, which I found thrilling and fascinating and ridiculous and kind of very demonstrative of the human condition. And I include myself, obviously, in that. And so I set myself the task of trying to, as I’m, you know, another artist, trying to carry out the original artist’s wishes. Of course, you could argue, did he just title it that or did he mean that it was for the blind? But I decided to understand the title as that this sculpture was for people who would identify as blind. And I set myself the task of trying to make that happen. I did it through a number of steps.

First of all, I petitioned the museum to loan the work. I was working as an artist in residence with the Fabric Workshop and Museum. We tried to get the Philadelphia Museum to loan us the original artwork and they said no. We tried to arrange for groups of people to come and experience the artwork by touch. They, you know, that also wasn’t possible.

We went through every version. We asked if we would be allowed to scan it to make a copy so that it could be touched. And this also wasn’t possible. So we went through every kind of version we could in order to get this into the hands of someone who would identify as blind.

And in the end, I did the last thing I could, which was as a sighted person, I could stand in front of it in the museum and I could describe it. And so I wrote a description, a visual description as close as I could. And then with the Fabric Workshop and Museum, we invited people who identified as blind or visually impaired. They didn’t have to be artists to come and listen to me read that description and to make the form that they understood from my words.

So each of the sculptures in this series were made by a different artist who identified as blind or visually impaired, according to the same description that I read out loud. And the Braille sign on the wall, which is only legible to somebody who’s able to read Braille, is that description that I read aloud. So that’s the one unifying core of this variety of sculptures.

One important part of this piece is that you’re allowed to touch these sculptures so they can be experienced directly by touch. And that’s the exact same way that they were made.

Joseph: Thank you so much, Lenka, for introducing us to your artwork and taking us through it in such interesting detail.

Lenka: Thank you for asking me. I’m delighted to be part of this exhibition. I’m incredibly honoured. And thanks, it was really nice to talk to you.

[Music]

Stop 15. Track 2.
Lenka Clayton, Sculpture for the Blind, By the Blind 2017

Water balloon. Chrysalis. Boulder. Snowball. Brazil nut. Loaf of bread. Flotation device. Hedgehog. Ostrich egg.

On three long black tables, arranged lengthways down the third gallery space, sit nine pale objects, three on each table.

They are all made of the same material: white plaster, coated in wax to give a smooth surface with a slight sheen that catches the light. They are all quite different shapes and sizes, and all show evidence of having been created by different hands. Some have been made as smooth and perfect as possible, while others are rougher and appear to have been deliberately carved or chipped. Some have holes carved or moulded into them while others are solid shapes. Some have distinct puckered fold marks at one end, suggesting that they have been made by pouring plaster into a bag.

What are these sculptures? How were they made? Who made them? And why do they seem to be similar and yet different at the same time?

On the wall to the left of the tables is a photograph and a Braille text. They are both the size and proportion of a small laptop screen. The photograph shows three white marble sculptures in a glass vitrine in a gallery at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The central sculpture in the vitrine is a smooth marble ovoid called Sculpture for the Blind, made by the sculptor Constantin Brâncuși in 1920. The name of the sculpture suggests that it was made to be handled by blind people, but it is now displayed inside a glass case and cannot be accessed by touch.

The Braille text next to the photograph is a description of the Brâncuși sculpture, written by Lenka Clayton.

Unless you can read braille, this description is inaccessible to you, a deliberate decision by the artist. She read this description to a group of blind and partially blind artists, who then made the nine sculptures displayed on the three tables here.

Given that all the participants had the same description, it is surprising how different the results are. They are like rocks from a river: all starting from the same point, all under the same flowing water, but all ending up different.

As you touch the surface of each artwork it feels cool and smooth. Although you can’t pick the objects up, you can get a sense of the weight of each one from its surface. You may be drawn to a particular sculpture: you might find the smoother, rounder objects more pleasing to touch or you might be more interested in those that have cavities to explore. You might be drawn to try and pick out resemblances to natural forms or man-made objects. You may find that some of the sculptures are peaceful to touch, perhaps conveying a sense of time and care, while others evoke something more aggressive, as though they’ve been attacked with an axe. You might try to decipher the arrangement of the sculptures, and whether there are any clues as to why they have been placed in this particular order.

End of Stop 15, Track 2.

Stop 16.

Hello, you’re now outside the Study Gallery at the Henry Moore Institute.

You’re now outside The Study Gallery at the Henry Moore Institute. Inside, you’ll find Wayfinding Sequence / Vibrational Re-Call (2018/2025) by Fayen d’Evie, created with Georgina Kleege, Hillary Goidell and Bryan Phillips.

The installation brings together sound and image. It’s a collaborative exploration of how we sense, describe and remember two encounters that the blind scholar Georgina Kleege had with Sequence, a monumental sculpture by Richard Serra. Step inside the gallery to experience the work.

[Music]