Braille Bake-Off: Make Plaster Biscuits with David Johnson and Emma Dickson

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.

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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.

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