Christine Sun Kim’s art practice explores sound, translated into other forms through performance, installation, drawings and video. She has been deaf since birth. In her TED talk (2015) she talks about knowing sound through watching the actions and reactions of others. She says that sound can be experienced as a visual image, it can be felt physically or described in words or movement. She also describes how, because she doesn’t use her literal voice to communicate, it often feels as though she has no voice at all in society. By working with ASL interpreters, she says she is able to borrow their voices temporarily, to allow her to be heard. Her practice reminds us that the world can be perceived, interpreted and negotiated in many ways, through different forms of cognition – Let’s listen with our eyes and not just our ears she says, let’s look at the bigger picture. This is a concept that we can embrace in fine art practice generally.
Last year, I worked with a student who wanted to describe their experience of night blindness through their painting practice. They employed a specific and muted colour palette and incorporated tactile elements such as sewn thread as a way of inviting the audience to explore the painting with their fingertips. This multi-sensory approach reminded me of the work of Chelsea College of Arts PhD graduate Aaron Peake, whose work I encountered whilst teaching there in 2012 and who describes himself as both a blind artist and an artist who happens to be blind. That is, I am simultaneously an artist who is defined by his blindness and an artist whose blindness is incidental to his art.
Peake’s bronze cast bells, singing bowls and wall-hung ‘painting’ works invite the audience to touch and ring them. The pieces are visual, aural and haptic, they vibrate, and Peake noted that children would sometimes place their faces directly on his works or even lick them on hot days, something that is rarely permitted in most exhibitions of fine art. Peake insists that the works were not made to address visual impairment nor to appeal specifically to a blind audience, rather, he writes that: the acts of listening and touching invited by the bronzes are designed to expand the remit of any encounter rather than act as replacements for the visual.
This expansion or shift in perception was successfully employed by a student that I worked with a few years ago. The student, who was a wheelchair user, encouraged the audience to experience the world seen from their position through short videos made by attaching cameras to their wheelchair. These were displayed in a bespoke gallery space with a lowered ceiling that forced the audience to stoop and crawl around the space. The student also wanted to highlight the physical barriers they encountered in the built environment on a daily basis – the steps, curbs and street furniture. This had been painfully highlighted earlier in the year, when the only lift in the college broke down for several weeks, barring the student’s access to the lecture theatre on the first floor of the building.
Christine Sun Kim and Aaron Peake’s work present us with opportunities to perceive the world in an expanded and multi-sensory way. But in order to fully embrace this proposition, we need to remove the physical, conceptual and perceptual barriers.
Reference: Aaron McPeake: Bell Bronzes: Reflections on a Blind Visual Arts Practice in Disability Studies Quarterly Vol 38, No 3 (2018) – https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/6479/5094