Beyond the Visual: Blindness and Expanded Sculpture

该提案是一个展览和公众参与活动，将探索当代雕塑如何促进超越视觉的感官参与。该展览计划于2025-6年在亨利·摩尔研究所（HMI）的主要画廊展出，在此之前将有一个研究季节和一个扩展的咨询过程。虽然我们将盲人和部分盲人视为主要观众，但该提案并不是为盲人举办的展览，而是不排除被展览边缘化的观众，因为观众无法接触或与作品互动。该展览名为“超越视觉”，旨在增强所有观众的触觉和非视觉感官参与，这与Georgina Kleege关于“失明给艺术带来什么”的更广泛的文化价值的论点相一致（Kleege 2018）。这构成了一种创新的知识交流形式，它扭转了既定的轨迹，巩固了我们对一系列公众参与活动（由盲人和非盲人从业者合作开展）的态度。我们还将解决现有雕塑档案（包括HMI持有的）中盲人和部分失明艺术家的代表性不足的问题，并将编制盲人艺术家的雕塑作品数据库，以及非盲人艺术家的作品，这些作品明确地解决了与雕塑实践有关的失明的启示。我们还将重新审视雕塑中“触感与光学”的争论，这样做的展览不仅寻求成为包容性的典范-面对触摸作品的禁令-而且反对触摸仅仅是在缺乏视觉的情况下的“补偿”感觉的概念。因此，该项目将对雕塑、触觉和失明之间的关系进行新的研究，并在此过程中重新评估实体雕塑是什么样的。

The proposal is for an exhibition and public engagement activities that will explore how contemporary sculpture facilitates sensory engagements beyond the visual. The exhibition is programmed for the main galleries at the Henry Moore Institute (HMI) for 2025-6, and will be preceded by a research season and an extended consultation process. While we identify blind and partially blind people as a primary audience, the proposal is not an exhibition for the blind, but rather sets out not to exclude an audience marginalised by exhibitions where beholders are unable to touch or interact with the works. The exhibition, entitled Beyond the Visual, aims to enhance the tactile and non-visual sensory engagement of all audiences, consistent with Georgina Kleege's arguments about the wider cultural value of 'what blindness brings to art' (Kleege 2018). This constitutes an innovative form of knowledge exchange which reverses established trajectories and underpins our attitude to a whole range of public engagement activities (delivered, collaboratively, by blind and non-blind practitioners). We will also address the underrepresentation of blind and partially blind artists in existing sculpture archives (including those held by HMI), and will compile a database of sculptural works by blind artists, alongside works by non-blind artists explicitly addressing the affordances of blindness in relation to sculptural practice. We will also revisit the 'tactility versus opticality' debate within sculpture, and in so doing the exhibition seeks not only to be an exemplar of inclusivity-confronting prohibitions on touching works-but to counter the notion of touch as merely a 'compensatory' sense in the absence of vision. The project will therefore conduct new research into the relation between sculpture, touch and blindness, and in so doing re-evaluate what kind of entity sculpture is.