About

Many art galleries provide pre-recorded or in-person description services to enable blind visitors to access their artworks. These descriptions aim to be objective and focus on the visual properties of artworks, sometimes resulting in a superficial, confusing or marginalising experience for visitors. In response, innovative approaches to artwork description use collectives of blind and non-blind visitors to create subjective, multisensory descriptions, promoting blindness as a pro-active and creative way of knowing the world, rather than as a problem or lack.

This practice-based PhD will use these innovative approaches to artwork description to produce a multinarrative creative text which is both a work of literature (e.g. a novel) and a form of artwork description for use in a gallery. In the role of a blind writer-researcher, I will generate material for the multinarrative text by conducting a large number of description dialogues with a diverse range of gallery visitors in front of an artwork in a London gallery. My approach to writing the creative text will be informed by research into post-modern literary technique, specifically the ways in which a narrative text can tell multiple stories simultaneously (as in Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives), and how post-modern writers have represented reality from marginalised narratorial perspectives (as with Isabel Waidner’s Sterling Karat Gold). I will use post-structuralist, feminist and queer theories regarding perception, unfaithful imitation and the undermining of stereotypes in order to write a multinarrative text which mimics and eventually subverts the negative connotations of blindness that exist in our culture. Ultimately, the multinarrative creative text will challenge traditional ideas which privilege sight over other ways of knowing the world, encouraging the reader to engage with a generative sense of uncertainty about “what is really there”, both when it comes to the artwork being described and the world beyond the gallery.