Beyond the Visual: Creative Approaches to Inclusivity for the Blind

Historically, arts and cultural institutions have predominantly engaged sight in the curation of their galleries. Justifiable restrictions on touch for art conservation reasons would be universally applied – the cultural engagement of a contemporary audience with low vision deemed as less important than that of an ableist-conceived ‘future’ audience for which artworks are preserved in perpetuity.

Following contributions from critical disability studies and researchers with lived experiences, this institutional context of systematic exclusion is starting to be rethought. Our most recent project – Beyond the Visual – a collaboration between Professor Ken Wilder, University of the Arts London (UAL) Professor of Aesthetics, the blind artist and researcher Dr Aaron McPeake, Associate Lecturer at Chelsea and Camberwell Colleges of Arts, part of University of the Arts London (UAL) and the Henry Moore Institute’s research curator Dr Clare O’Dowd, demonstrates how university academics can drive long-term, interdisciplinary research collaborations with national institutions in such a way as to bring about genuine long-term impact. The project received two consecutive UKRI/AHRC grants, including the first ever AHRC Exhibition Fund award – a new funding stream aimed at innovative public-facing research with a significant social agenda.

Beyond the Visual is the UK’s first major sculpture exhibition where blind and partially blind practitioners not only make up the majority of exhibitors but are central to the collaborative curatorial process. The exhibition will include seven new commissions, plus historical and contemporary work by sixteen international artists.

Drawing upon Wilder’s philosophical aesthetics and McPeake’s lived experience as a blind practitioner, we have translated our academic research around issues of non-sighted modes of beholding art into a project that impacts directly upon gallery and museum design, policy and curatorial practice. Working with project partners the Henry Moore Institute and disability-led arts organisation Shape Arts, we set out to question how a consideration of the engagement of blind audiences by contemporary art potentially opens up new ways of thinking about so-called ‘visual’ arts. It is a project that not only seeks to shift thinking about accessibility in institutions within the museum/gallery sector, but more widely in terms of arts education. This includes feeding back the research into the research culture of our own institution, University of the Arts London.

Beyond the Visual

Inclusivity is a creative matter. Within critical disabilities studies, there has been an important shift in discussions around inclusivity for people with disabilities in relation to museums and galleries: from a narrow focus on an ‘accommodation of needs’ towards acknowledging how disability-led creative approaches to inclusivity benefit all audiences by opening up new forms of knowledge.

This shift is nowhere more evident than in relation to blindness, and blind artists and theorists are at the forefront of confronting boundaries to inclusivity. This practice-led shift in thinking is set against an unreceptive artworld where blind and partially blind people are still routinely excluded from engaging with art, typified by the ubiquitous ‘do not touch’ directive.

The Story Behind: Beyond the Visual

The initial idea for Beyond the Visual emerged from a 2017 collaboration on a sound and light installation in Sweden, between a blind artist, Aaron McPeake, and a non-blind artist and UAL researcher Ken Wilder. The next step was the founding of an AHRC-funded network, Beyond the Visual, comprising blind and partially blind artists and writers, along with blind and non-blind curators, architects/designers, audio describers, accessibility officers, disability advocates, philosophers and psychologists. The network culminated with a major two-day symposium hosted by one of the network’s partner organisations, the Wellcome Collection, which coincided with the opening of Wellcome Collection’s groundbreaking exhibition In Plain Sight.

The research emerging from the network, hosted at Chelsea College of Arts, UAL, was fundamental to the authors being awarded the inaugural £250,000 AHRC exhibition fund for the three-year research and exhibition project on inclusivity, Beyond the Visual. The project will culminate in an exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute, which runs from 28 November 2025 to 19 April 2026.

The research has collaboration at its core. Out of this collaborative process, three curatorial principles were established: that the majority of artists would be blind or partially blind; that inclusivity be embedded at every level of the project; that all works had to be engaged through multiple senses, including, but not restricted to, touch.

Impact in an educational context

What might such a project contribute to a higher education context? Although there have been considerable changes in Equality, Diversity and Inclusivity (EDI) practices within universities and higher education institutions, more needs to be done to actively encourage disabled staff and students to participate in courses and to actively champion non-normative practices. Disability should always be seen as an integral part of efforts to decolonise the curriculum.

Beyond the Visual advances the EDI agenda through both leadership and method: the project champions disability leadership and equitable co-production, placing collaboration at the heart of its decision-making processes. We respond by confronting the ocularcentrism that underlines much arts education. In other words, the fact that sight is prioritised above other senses. As blind writer (and project advisor for Beyond the Visual) Georgina Kleege, notes in an article ‘Touch tours for all!’ that appeared in Tate etc. 56:

“True inclusion of previously marginalised groups requires abandoning mere accommodation of differences; it means fostering collaboration with different kinds of knowledge and expertise.”

With regards to blindness, actively supporting students with disabilities means seriously rethinking the ocularcentric remit of an institution. The default categorisations embedded in the very notion of ‘visual’ arts by implication excludes practices that challenge the dominance of sight. It also means addressing how universities characterise, promote and recruit to courses. Artist and teacher Serafina Min , one of the artists in Beyond the Visual, has been involved in discussions with a specialist school about how to prepare students with visual impairments for HE, including developing confidence: a vital means of support that doesn’t currently exist. Such work builds upon earlier research undertaken by The DisOrdinary Architecture project (co-founded by Jos Boys and Zoe Partington, and a project partner for the Beyond the Visual network), which likewise addresses recruitment of blind and partially blind people into architectural education.

The project also places inclusivity at the heart of the people, culture and environment submission for the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2029, particularly with regards to creating an inclusive research environment. This is a live example of practice-based research generating policy, institutional change and external impact, and the project is already being adopted as an internal REF exemplar at UAL. Importantly, the research engages the university’s social purpose agenda not as a top-down directive, but a bottom-up initiative that has led to internal workshops, peer dissemination, and a strong commitment to building a collaborative research culture consistently over the course of the two funded projects . This is particularly important given that most disability-related entries in previous REF have tended to fall under education, healthcare, or inclusive design rather than creative arts or artistic leadership by individuals with disabilities.

Emerging from this research, a major HE-focused output is the 23-chapter Open Access volume we have co-edited, Beyond the Visual: Multisensory Modes of Beholding Art (UCL Press, 28 August 2025). This features contributions from many members of the multidisciplinary network we have built. It constitutes a founding text of the emerging field of Blindness Arts (a term developed by Hannah Thompson, one of the contributors) and will constitute an essential resource for Critical Disability Studies, inclusive curating and arts policy. Laurie Britton Newell, in the forward to the volume, gives an indication of the impact of the publication on institutions such as the Wellcome Collection:

“Working as a Senior Curator at Wellcome Collection, an institution with a medical collection at its centre, I have increasingly sought to embed a social model of disability into our curatorial practice, and to present different forms of learnt and lived expertise side by side with equity. However, our work has largely focused on representation and the development of different accessible interpretation tools. Many of the contributors [to this book] have helped me to think deeply and rethink what it means to experience an exhibition – and how to shape three-dimensional stories in ways that communicate better to all the senses.”

In bringing together an amazing diversity of voices, from academics and artists writing about what blindness brings to art, to psychologists and neuroscientists researching non-visual orientation, the volume constitutes an invaluable handbook. As Anna Tylor, Chair of Trustees at the RNIB, states:

“As a severely sight impaired person who loves ‘the arts’ in all their richness, this book challenges the intersection between a range of established, but outdated, views about sight loss and who can and cannot appreciate or make art. While some of the arguments have been rehearsed elsewhere, this book marks the first really coherent approach to setting out just what visually impaired and blind people bring to art as a way of exploring the world, and art that can be appreciated beyond the visual. It powerfully sets out the net contribution of sight loss to human creative endeavour and the experience of appreciating that output that I can relate to.”

Contributors to the volume not only include leading international writers on blindness arts, such as Georgina Kleege and Hannah Thompson, but blind and partially blind artists, such as Jo Bannon, Fayen d’Evie, David Johnson and Collin van Uchelen, and theatre practitioners such as Maria Oshodi.

Reshaping accessibility practices in national institutions

As a result of Beyond the Visual, accessibility at the Henry Moore Institute has been completely rethought. An intrinsic part of the creative and curatorial process rather than a compliance measure, consultation happens at the very start. All exhibitions now integrate collaborative approaches to audio description (following guidelines co-designed by a network of blind and partially blind artists), with new accessible signage, large print guides and staff training in inclusive curatorial methods, empowering invigilators (or docents) to actively engage with visitors with different access needs. Too often invigilators are seen as ‘minders’, preventing touch; Beyond the Visual turns this on its head. Art can be interacted with using multiple senses. Touch tours are now an embedded part of all exhibitions. In addition to this, we have worked with the Henry Moore Institute to lead conversations with artists, galleries and engagement facilitators that support inclusion and access. Discussions around handling artworks, reference objects and objects or materials from their making process have led to institutions considering how audiences might engage with their practice and artworks outside of only using sight. Furthermore, this has led to the Henry Moore Institute strengthening their relationships with and broadening their network of Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) and specialist schools and community groups, collaborating on outreach projects and opportunities to work together within the gallery and supporting where appropriate the completion of elements of the Arts Award National Scheme.

In addition to the Henry Moore Institute, workshops and symposiums related to the Beyond the Visual project have been hosted by the Wellcome Collection, Tate Modern, the Leeds Art Gallery, the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, the Henry Moore Foundation (at Perry Green) and UAL. Going forward, our ambition is: that other art institutions begin to adopt some of the collaborative working practices we have developed, transforming curatorial policy and increasing accessibility; that artists become more aware of the creative potential of art that engages multiple senses, not just vision; and that Higher Education providers actively rethink their normative curricula, confronting ocularcentric and other sensory biases by actively taking steps to encourage students with disabilities to participate in ‘visual’ arts courses.

These changes will only come about, however, if institutions employ more curators, artists and educators with disabilities, as we shift from compliance to an emphasis on the creative potential of disability, recognising different body capabilities and sensory acuities and opening up new multisensory ways of appreciating art.

By Professor Ken Wilder, artist and Professor of Aesthetics at University of the Arts London (UAL) and Dr Aaron McPeake, artist and Associate Lecturer at Chelsea College of Arts (UAL)