Blindness and Expanded Sculpture

Encouraging new inquiry into what kinds of experience artworks make possible.

This conference is concerned with the expanded creative, curatorial, and historiographical opportunities that arise when we refuse to separate out the senses and destabilise the normative, vision-based frame of art reception.

The conference asks: what can blindness bring to sculpture? What does this approach reveal about sculpture’s ontological reality?

This workshop is part of a three-year research project, Beyond the Visual: Blindness and Expanded Sculpture. The project, a collaboration between the Henry Moore Institute, Shape Arts and University of the Arts London, was the recipient of the inaugural Arts and Humanities Research Council Exhibition Fund. The project will culminate with a landmark 2025 exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute, foregrounding work by blind and partially blind artists.

Call for participation

For this one-day conference we invite new contributions from the philosophy of art, curatorial practice, art history, critical disability studies, psychology and the sciences which engage with inclusive forms of making and beholding sculpture.