Blindness and Expanded Sculpture Conference

This conference is concerned with the expanded creative, curatorial, and historiographical opportunities that arise when we refuse to separate out the senses and destabilise the normative, vision-based frame of art reception.

The conference asks: what can blindness bring to sculpture? What does this approach reveal about sculpture’s ontological reality?

This event is part of a three-year research project, Beyond the Visual: Blindness and Expanded Sculpture. The project, a collaboration between the Henry Moore Institute, Shape Arts and University of the Arts London, was the recipient of the inaugural Arts and Humanities Research Council Exhibition Fund. The project will culminate with a landmark 2025 exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute, foregrounding work by blind and partially blind artists.

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About Beyond the Visual

Beyond the Visual: Blindness and Expanded Sculpture is a ground-breaking collaborative research project spearheaded by Dr Ken Wilder (University of the Arts London Professor of Aesthetics), Dr Aaron McPeake (artist and Associate Lecturer at Chelsea College of Arts) and Dr Clare O’Dowd (Research Curator at the Henry Moore Institute), together with Shape Arts, the UK’s leading disability-led arts organisation. The project is the recipient of the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s (AHRC) inaugural Exhibition Fund, a major grant supporting innovative, collaborative exhibition approaches. The three-year project will culminate in a free exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute, in November 2025.

As part of the project, the Beyond the Visual Research Season will explore engagements with contemporary sculpture using senses other than sight, challenging the dominance of sight in the making and appreciation of art and investigating wider questions around the nature of artworks and the varied ways in which they can be experienced. The Research Season aims to rethink not only the under-representation of blind and partially blind arts practitioners but also the relationship between artworks and audiences, exploring what is gained from creative practices that emphasise a broader approach to sensory experience.

Access Information

Visit the Leeds Art Gallery website for full information about accessibility in the venue. 

Banner image: Aaron McPeake's Once I Saw It All, 2022. Description: photograph of a pair of white hands, one holding some sort of hammer, the other a metal ring, caught in motion, tapping the ring with the hammer.