Publication date: 21 August 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781800088856
Number of illustrations: 117
Beyond the Visual
Multisensory modes of beholding art
Ken Wilder (Editor), Aaron McPeake (Editor)
Beyond the Visual broadens the discussion of multisensory ways of beholding contemporary art, with a particular emphasis on modes that transcend a dependency upon sight. A central premise is that a shift in the aesthetic engagement afforded by hybrid forms of contemporary art has the potential to open up new sensory and cognitive engagements for blind and partially blind people. This is a subject that has rarely been addressed within the literature on contemporary arts or disability studies.
Bringing together leading international scholars and artists in the emerging field of ‘blindness arts’, including blind and partially blind artists, curators, advocates for inclusive practices and models of audio description, cognitive psychologists, and theorists of installation, performance and sound art, the book offers a detailed consideration of exemplars of such multisensory engagement, pre-eminently in works by blind or partially blind artists. In so doing, the book not only shifts the discussion on access and inclusivity – reconceiving access as integral to the creative process – but argues that this has the potential to enrich the experience of art for all beholders, moving beyond an often-unexamined reliance on vision.
List of figures
List of contributors
Foreword
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Ken Wilder and Aaron McPeake
Part I: Critical reflections on blindness arts
1 Modes of touch: modelling haptic engagement
Georgina Kleege
2 Blindness gain and the arts: from blindness arts to critical blindness studies and back again
Hannah Thompson, Vanessa Warne and Marion Chottin
3 Blindness as the creative liberation of curatorial practice
Fayen d’Evie
Part II: Towards inclusivity
4 Extant: provoking, disrupting and redefining expectations of the blind and visually impaired presence in theatre
Maria Oshodi
5 Architecture Beyond Sight: working with blind and partially sighted people to co-develop design methods beyond the visual
Jos Boys, Poppy Levison, Duncan Meerding, Zoe Partington and Mandy Redvers-Rowe
6 Philosophical and pedagogical theories on the creative play of children with visual impairments
Simon Hayhoe
Part III: Access as praxis
7 Moving towards touch: the ambulatory aesthetics of description
Amanda Cachia
8 Shaping collective access: community and interdependence in Carmen Papalia’s praxis
Àger Pérez Casanovas
9 Cross-sensory translation of light in the pyrotechnical arts
Collin van Uchelen
Part IV: Multisensory environments
10 The art of getting lost
Simon Ungar
11 Blue House: the intangible space
Lydia Ya Chu Chang
12 Circumstantes: a site-specific performance installation and film
Ken Wilder and Aaron McPeake
Part V: Touch, sound, smell, taste
13 Holding Eva Hesse [treatment]
Fayen d’Evie
14 Sounds as vibration: a method of making and a mode of reception in contemporary arts practice
Aaron McPeake
15 To be sniffed at: the role of smell in contemporary art
Clare O’Dowd
16 The mouth between the eyes: food art and material, social, sensorial relations
Rain Wu
Part VI: Words, translations, descriptions
17 Extracts from Black Cane Diary
Joseph Rizzo Naudi
18 A film you can feel: sensory deception, translation and confluence
Jo Bannon
19 Reimagining inclusive museum audio description: what it is, who creates it, and who is it for?
Rachel Hutchinson and Alison Eardley
20 Describing anarchy
Matthew Cock and Hannah Thompson
Part VII: Towards a blind aesthetics
21 Blind aesthetics: complexity, contingency and conflict
David Johnson
22 Gravity: the great big weight of the (visual) world
David Mollin and Salomé Voegelin
23 ‘Touch-space’, ‘blindness gain’ and the ontology of sculpture
Ken Wilder
Index
DOI: 10.14324/111.9781800088856
Number of illustrations: 117
Publication date: 21 August 2025
PDF ISBN: 9781800088856
EPUB ISBN: 9781800088863
Hardback ISBN: 9781800088832
Paperback ISBN: 9781800088849
Ken Wilder (Editor) 
Ken Wilder is an artist, writer and University of the Arts London Professor of Aesthetics.
Aaron McPeake (Editor)
Aaron McPeake is an artist and academic, registered blind, and teaches at University of the Arts London.
‘It is often difficult to find the right language to talk about things that haven’t been talked about enough. This publication meets that challenge head on. It will shine a light on the relationship between blindness and art practice, a subject long deserving of far greater consideration; but beyond that, it has the potential to impact on a wider discussion about art and the way we experience it, reminding us that the best so-called “visual art” must always be much more than visual.’
Godfrey Worsdale OBE, Director of the Henry Moore Foundation
‘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.’
Anna Tylor, Chair of Trustees, RNIB
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