David Johnson, 'Inhibition: Beyond the shadow of doubt' 2025 Audio guide

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 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 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 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 Dog Girl. 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 Dog Girl. 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 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 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 Fireflower 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 depths.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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]