Sensory Innovations and Creativity in the Arts

Ekphrasis can be defined as a poetic ‘description’ (OED), ‘representation’ (James A.W. Heffernan) or ‘response’ (Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux) to visual art. As an inherently subjective and multi-sensory form of poetic engagement, Carney argues that ekphrastic inquiry can be used in art museums as an interpretive tool, inviting visitors to contribute their subjective, creative responses to an ever-expanding collaborative display, alongside existing curatorial labels.

This interpretative process draws on the concept of poetic inquiry as a method of research that can offer ‘new ways of seeing’ through reflection and interrogation (Jen Webb and Donna Lee Brien 2010), seeking to enrich and complicate the engagement or ‘viewing’ process in a variety of ways, that transforms the gallery into a more culturally democratic space, challenging the traditional power dynamics between museum staff and visitors, or between celebrated artists and their audience.

This paper will examine what happens when ekphrastic activities (reading or listening, writing or drawing) are transferred to a museum gallery, enabling casual museum visitors to engage with visual art, and with each other’s creative texts.

Carney will discuss the results of an interactive ekphrastic display that took place at National Museum Cardiff in 2022, focusing on the multi-sensory, tangible, subjective, relational and inclusive aspects of the display. She will also suggest potential developments that might enable participation for a wider range of visitors, through interactive audio recording technology.

Dr Rachel Carney is a poet, visual artist and creative writing tutor. Her PhD research (at Cardiff and Aberystwyth Universities) was funded by the South, West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Manchester Metropolitan University and an MA in Museum Studies from Newcastle University, and has previously worked in learning and engagement roles in museums.

Her debut poetry collection Octopus Mind (Seren Books, 2023) was selected as one of The Guardian’s Best Poetry Books of 2023. She currently teaches at Cardiff University.

As a deaf and disabled writer and artist, Chouglay will speak about her creative working methodology, focusing primarily on creative ways of accessing and responding to rural landscapes. Nature Calling, funded by Arts Council England, DEFRA, and the National Landscapes Association, has commissioned her to write in response to the Lincolnshire Wolds, working with community groups and connecting with the land to create a poetic response, which will later connect to the work of the commissioned artists for the area.

Chouglay has taken a layered approach to access, working with the landscape both outdoors and indoors through objects, memory, multiple senses, and visualisation. Within this, and other work, she has expanded her definition of drawing and mark making to open the mind for writing.

Within her general practice, she has been developing methods of translating her poetry into imagery, accompanying words with shapes and symbols, feeling that such representations can sometimes capture more abstract feelings, like pain, more fully than purely the written word. It changes the narrative, with hearing audiences also relying on subtitles. As Virginia Woolf states in her essay, ‘The Cinema’ (1926), “Something abstract… something which calls for the very slightest help from words or music to make itself intelligible, yet justly uses them subserviently – of such movements and abstractions the films may, in time to come, be composed.” Chouglay feels the above quotation captures something of the method she has been working to express, and these shapes and symbols can be translated into other senses, including the tactile.

Ayesha Chouglay is a writer, artist and facilitator, and recently judged the Deaf and Disabled Writers Commissions for Spread the Word, alongside Joseph Rizzo Naudi, for the second year running. She is one of the commissioned writers for Nature Calling, a £2m National Landscapes Art Programme, and is writing poetry inspired by the Lincolnshire Wolds, whilst working with a variety of community groups, exploring barriers to accessing the landscape.

As a deaf and disabled person herself, she uses personal experience to open up safe spaces for conversation. She has an MA in The Contemporary from the University of Kent, for which she was awarded two scholarships.

Audrey Barker (1932-2002) was a pioneering British disabled artist whose practice embraced issues around disability, accessibility and different forms of communication. In the 1980s and 1990s she made several large, multi-sensory, site-specific installations and environments.

The first of these was Another Way of Seeing. Originally commissioned for the Bradford Festival, 1987, this had a number of iterations around the North East and Cumbria, where Barker lived. Publicity for the Laing Gallery, Newcastle, 1988, advertised an “installation with things to touch, smell, taste and wear”. As well as her own life, she was informed by the experience of other disabled artists she worked alongside. She was particularly proud of her work with deaf-blind artist Alan Foley, who she mentored and exhibited with. She described her work as “using the ‘languages’ of disability as an art form”, incorporating audio, raised text, braille and sign language.

Understanding the broad appeal of her installations, Barker was keen to show them in non-arts spaces. In 1989 she organised the Festival of the 5 Senses at Wentworth Leisure Centre, Hexham. It attracted thousands of visitors, many drawn in from the Centre or adjacent supermarket. Referring mostly to archive material held at NDACA, the National Disability Arts Collection and Archive (a project managed by Shape Arts), Cranshaw will give an insight into Barker’s artistic practice and her aim “to entice the viewer to participate in the exploration of all senses – touch, hearing, seeing, smelling etc.”

Gill Crawshaw is a curator and researcher. She draws on her experience of disability activism to organise projects which highlight issues affecting disabled people. Crawshaw has organised exhibitions which have addressed representation of disabled artists (Possible All Along, 2020), charity (Piss on Pity, 2019), and cuts to welfare spending (Shoddy, 2016). Any work that wanted doing (2023) brought together disabled people’s voices from the past and present, as disabled artists responded to her research into hidden histories of disabled mill workers. She has an MA in Curation Practices from Leeds Arts University and is a member of the British Art Network Emerging Curators Group 2024.

Audio description is often understood as an access tool for blind and partially blind artwork beholders, and it is generally made available alongside its associated artwork. But what happens if the audio description is exhibited independently as an art form, without its corresponding original artwork?

Ensemble, an audio-based group exhibition at APT Gallery, London, May 2024, was part of a project funded by Arts Council England that challenged the visual as the primary sensory mode in art exhibitions by exhibiting audio descriptions as artworks in their own right. By reflecting on blindness as a spur to creativity, collaboration and inclusion, the exhibition platformed experimental approaches to audio description creation and curation. The co-creative description process of multiple voices, divergent perspectives, avant-garde literary technique and contemporary research immersed beholders in a communal, multi-sensory imaginal space.

This presentation will set out the aims, rationale and core concepts of Ensemble; explore the curatorial and creative processes at work in the show; discuss audience reaction, artist feedback and next steps; and invite the audience to engage in the description process for themselves.

Hettie James and Stephanie Farmer are a freelance artist-curator / curator duo who have worked on Ensemble, an Arts Council funded exhibition at APT Gallery, 2024 and A Garden with Animals, 2022. They focus on audience experience, perception and communication in written, spoken and heard formats and through this explore interpretation, language, relationships and the role of the curator, artist and audience.

Joseph Rizzo Naudi is a partially blind writer whose work is supported by Arts Council England and the AHRC. His practice-based PhD research at Royal Holloway combines fiction technique, artwork description and the creative potential of blindness.

linktr.ee/joerizzonaudi

This paper looks at some of the findings and continued research that has developed starting from an exhibition Behold: a show about Touch, that Galitzine curated and produced in 2023.

Realising early on in her research that the subject of touch demanded a more holistic sensorial approach, she formed a new ‘mediation team’ of both blind and sighted collaborators; to help embed access both conceptually and physically, from early on in the process.

In dialogue with the show’s participating artists a mediation ‘menu’ was developed to guide visitors/ participants around the exhibition space to help ‘behold’ all artworks in more multi-nodal and engaging ways. Alongside this both existing works and new commissions were selected, specifically for their multi-nodal, interactive / touchable qualities; from Hermione Spriggs’ listening ‘schticks’ and Alastair Kwan’s ‘Congee Canteen’ to Louise Ashcroft’s interactive story-telling coat and Georgina Starr’s touchable slime, the norms of gallery space were undermined by inviting louder interrogations of the works.

An accompanying free public programme included a ‘listened to’ and danced version of the show as well as various multi-sensorial workshops. Galitzine will present some of this process and examine which aspects of our methods seemed to surprise and impact most effectively on the artists, mediators and visitors (who themselves became active participants in the exhibition) and the effects on ways of engaging with the world afterwards.

Sasha Galitzine is an independent curator whose practice centres around playful ways of bringing different people together for unusual encounters with one another using art as the catalyst. Each exhibition or gathering is developed having spent months in dialogue with communities who often feel like they have less experience with or access to the arts.

From establishing and running local heritage site Gerry’s Pompeii, made by Irish immigrant Gerard Dalton, to initiating canal-boat lead Dionysian processions and artist-hair & beauty salon installations along a South London bus route, Galitzine is interested in developing exhibitions as quasi-playgrounds to help make the public feel excited to experiment and interact more boldly with contemporary art and one another.

Johnson will present a short paper on the subject of the anamnesis of memory. Anamnesis is part of his forthcoming PhD submission and is one of the central arguments in his thesis that focuses on the separation of the image and the eye, and is part of a larger argument to blind aesthetics.

Our bodies are ready to see whether or not we can see. The embodied memory of seeing is available to all of us. This is the ‘readiness’ of the body to experience the world. Our knowledge of the world derives primarily from our embodied presence in the world as integral elements of that world.

Here the body is ready to see and to be seen. It is ready to touch and to be touched; it is ready to hear and to be heard. The body, blind, disabled or not, is of the world that it is experiencing. The body and the world are one and it is this oneness or of-ness that is anamnesis. Johnson will discuss two of his artworks that stand as material embodiments of anamnesis. These pieces are Blind I Stand Before the Mirror … and I As Object Unseen.

David Johnson is a UK based, blind artist. He is unashamedly a blind artist rather than an artist who is blind. In his art practice he uses a multitude of materials and processes including concrete, plaster, found objects and sonics. He produces a wide range of cast objects, 3D print objects, assemblages and installations. His pieces range from the monumental to the hand-held, and often involve familiar, everyday objects. His art mission is not to overcome the barriers that blindness undoubtedly puts in the way, but rather to show that experiences of beauty and knowledge are still core elements in a blind person’s life.

During the winter of 2022, an exhibition premiered in MGK Siegen (Germany). Odor – Immaterial Sculptures made an (un-?) intentional move towards inclusivity in experiencing art. The ephemeral sculptures are labelled as immaterial, as the artworks are invisible. The air in the rooms functions as a mediator between the odour and the recipient. Not to be noticed by so-called primary senses as via vision, but by smelling each artwork. Due to a different kind of experiencing the exhibition was made accessible for people whose senses may be impaired.

This kind of accessibility, which ephemeral sculptures hold, will be analysed as a case study of phenomenological experiences with the so-called ‘secondary’ senses such as smelling. So too will the inclusivity that olfactory art holds within the exhibition, with references to Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception 2008 and Madalina Diaconus’ Reflections on an Aesthetics of Touch, Smell and Taste 2005.

In addition, the political aspects in sensory innovations, that can be implemented by the material air, will be discussed. “The capacity for a purely physical vision that is supposed to be forever inaccessible to the blind turns out to be itself a kind of blindness.” (Mitchel, 1986). In making the experience of emotional and political artworks accessible for the blind and visually impaired, air and olfactory art supply an opportunity for inclusivity and new vocabulary for judging, describing and experiencing artworks – which adapts to the recipients rather than the other way round, leading to an autonomous and respectful handling with blind or visually impaired recipients.

Lara Jade Schumacher works as a research assistant for Prof. Dr Timo Skrandies at the Institute of Art History at Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany. She is currently completing her master’s degree in art history with a focus on political art, critical zone research and air as material. Last year she gave a lecture on breathing air and political art regarding climate change, a publication is to follow at the beginning of 2025 with DeGruyter.

Since 2018 White has collaborated with Surface Area Dance Theatre, an inclusive contemporary dance company, primarily focusing their research of haptic wearable technology into sound works. SUBPAC is a leading innovator in wearable haptic technology.

Worn by D/deaf and hard of hearing participants, the experience of music and sound becomes felt by the wearer, and a heightened sensory experience is achieved. We refer to this sensation as a ‘listening body’. With the score for the film Behind the face of a rock, throwing stones, SUBPAC became an instrument to enhance the sensory experience of viewing/listening – an extension of the typical musical production toolkit.

The use of the SUBPAC in rehearsal and studio environments have become integral. Wearing the SUBPAC whilst experimenting with sounds in a studio environment means we can become closer to the sounds produced, to reframe what is heard. White has led engagement in a variety of arts venues across the world, presenting their research and findings to both D/deaf and hearing participants, allowing new audiences to experience the technology that is scarcely available due to cost and availability.

A notable example of this was part of a British Council residency in Ise, Japan in which Nicole Vivien Watson (director of Surface Area) and White led workshops with the Ise Ondo folk dance society and the local D/deaf and hard of hearing community. Taking recording sounds of traditional instruments used in their performances and field recordings from the area, they merged modern technology with ancient musical instruments.

Tom White is an artist who focuses on sound-based practices such as live performance, installation, recordings, composition for dance and film. He is interested in the physicality and phenomena of sound; how it can be felt by the body and experienced in architectural space.

He has performed extensively across the UK and Europe, travelled to North America and Japan and had work published by labels such as Takuroku (Cafe OTO), Glistening Examples, Vitrine, Chocolate Monk, Calling Cards Publishing and South London Gallery. He won the British Composer Award in 2014 (Sonic Art) for Public Address, commissioned by South London Gallery.

Artworks experienced via touch challenge traditional notions of experiencing and interpreting sculpture. It is crucial to examine how such works are treated under UK Copyright Law. Copyright is important to artists, providing them with moral and economic rights, including the right of attribution and control over their work’s reproduction. For these protections to apply, the work must be legally recognised as an ‘artistic work’ under s.4 Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988, which offers a rigid definition of protected artistic mediums.

This Act requires that a work must fit within a specific category, such as sculpture, to receive copyright protection. The judiciary has further specified that for a work to qualify as sculpture, it must be created primarily with a sculptural purpose alongside the intention to be ‘enjoyed as a visual thing’.  There are similar visual biases in other categories of artistic works. This visual-centric interpretation raises concerns about whether tactile works are unfairly excluded from copyright protection.

Wren’s PhD critically examines these legal definitions, questioning whether the current copyright framework inadvertently marginalises artists who create works experienced via touch. By exploring this intersection of art and law, it is apparent that a failure to adequately protect tactile artworks could undermine the rights of artists and the cultural importance of artistic expression. It is essential for art historians, curators, and artists to engage with these legal issues to ensure a more inclusive understanding and protection for all forms of creative expression.

Annaliese Wren is a PhD candidate in Intellectual Property Law and a Contract Law seminar tutor at the University of Bristol. She is also undertaking an Associate-Fellowship at the CREATE HEA Institute. Wren holds a bachelor’s degree in history of art and history, a master’s degree in law, and has undertaken courses in Art Law at the Sotheby’s Institute of Art, and Intellectual Property Law with the World Intellectual Property Organisation.

Her PhD explores how artworks are categorised and defined within artistic copyright. Her thesis uses tactile art as a case study to highlight potential visual centric biases and the marginalisation of certain artists under the current UK approach, and contrasts this to the stance taken within EU law. She is currently collecting empirical data by interviewing individuals in the arts sector, art lawyers and artists with the aim of using this information to suggest a more equitable legal framework around artistic copyright.