Why One UK Museum Is Decentring the Visual

This month, the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds opens ‘Beyond the Visual’, the UK’s first major exhibition created by and with blind and partially blind artists and curators. Informed by decades of disability activism, the work of academics in critical blindness studies and crip theory, as well as artists developing new forms, the exhibition highlights how blind creators harness the perceptual and imaginative qualities of their blindness to expand registers of art in exciting new ways. It can be seen as a hopeful sign that UK institutions are finally starting to recognize ‘disability gain’ – the benefits for all audiences of embedding access in the creative process from the outset. The term derives from artist Aaron Williamson’s phrase ‘deaf gain’, coined in 1998 to counter questions about his ‘hearing loss’; examples in the public sphere include audible announcements on public transport, dropped kerbs and seating in museums, all of which are now used by everyone.

‘Beyond the Visual’ is indicative of a shift in cultural institutions from the idea of access as accommodation to access as creativity. Co-curated by Ken Wilder, professor of aesthetics at University of the Arts London (UAL); Aaron McPeake, a blind artist and associate lecturer at Chelsea College of Arts; and Henry Moore research curator Clare O’Dowd, it is the culmination of a three-year partnership between the institute, UAL and Shape Arts aimed at challenging the dominance of sight in the creation and appreciation of art. As McPeake explains, the exhibition will make it ‘inviting for people to touch, listen to, smell, look at the work and move their bodies around it’, something which is ‘typically prohibited’.

This approach is not about substituting one sense for another but about expanding the range of the senses with which we encounter art. Enhanced sensory engagement is something I argue for in my book More Than the Eyes: Art, Food and the Senses (2025), not just because it enables richer experiences but because it subverts the historically Eurocentric and discriminatory hierarchy of the senses, in which the supremacy of sight reinforces social and systemic injustices including ableism, racialization, gender imbalance and class division. Valuing access as an integral part of the creative process means appreciating many different modes of encounter. I am not blind, but like blind and non-blind people, I want to experience the world as fully as I can. I also want to enjoy new ways of thinking about, making and presenting art, including the creative innovations of blind artists.

Much of the work in ‘Beyond the Visual’ incites multiple senses at once and, as the exhibition title suggests, decentres the visual in the process. For instance, Wayfinding ‘Sequence’/Vibrational Re-Call (2025), a collaboration between artists Fayen d’Evie and Hillary Goidell, writer Georgina Kleege – professor emeritus of English at University of California, Berkeley – and sound artist Bryan Phillips, comprises a recording of Kleege interacting with Richard Serra’s 2006 sculpture Sequence using her white cane, along with her audio description of that engagement and close-up photographs by Goidell, who has extreme myopia. The work brings out qualities that are often passed over by sighted audiences, such as the surface texture, mass and resonance of materials, as well as minute details only perceivable through touch or extreme photographic close-ups.

Audio description features in several works in the show. This is not just for blind people’s benefit but, McPeake says, also about ‘unpacking and unpicking a whole wealth of information and knowledge within the work’ for everyone. In the social space of the gallery, where beholding art is often a collective experience, creative audio description (CAD) has evolved as an accessible and inclusive form in response to traditional audio descriptions, which avoid opinion and emotion and strive – but fail – to deliver objectivity. In contrast, CAD embraces the subjective nature of experience to bring art to life in new ways through the collaboration of blind and sighted people. Blind scholar Hannah Thompson, professor of French and critical disability studies at Royal Holloway, University of London, who has pioneered research into blindness gain in museums and galleries, says the form ‘uses voices to destabilize hierarchies of the visual in cultural institutions and question who has the right to generate knowledge’.

For ‘Beyond the Visual’, partially blind writer Joseph Rizzo Naudi and visually impaired artist Sally Booth brought together groups of people to engage in dialogue in front of works, inviting partially blind and sighted people to describe the art for blind people so they could respond to it for CADs. In his recent radio programme ‘Ways of Not Seeing’ (2025) – inspired by John Berger’s 1982 essay ‘The Hals Mystery’ – Rizzo Naudi remarks that ‘as much as my eyesight is bad, my blindness is good’ and makes the case that ‘blind ways of engaging with art can unlock galleries for everyone.’ Along with artists, gallery educators and a poet, it features Kleege, who argues for CAD to be considered a literary form.

Reframing blindness as difference rather than deficit exposes the limitations of the category of ‘visual art’ and of traditional curating. At the Henry Moore Institute, an access-led approach is now the default: gallery information assistants are trained as sighted guides and in disability awareness and live audio description. For O’Dowd, this has to represent a long-term structural shift, because without it, museums will lose audiences. She acknowledges that ‘it takes work and resources, but it’s not insurmountable. The question becomes: how do you deliver that in a way that is sustainable for the artworks and the institution and valuable for visitors?’

The supremacy of the visual is not the only hierarchy that needs dismantling: many galleries and museums still operate in ways that reinforce class barriers, geographic centralization, linguistic assumptions, neurotypical curatorial models – the list goes on. But the contributions of blind and partially blind practitioners can guide us as we make our institutions work for all. Rather than asking what is lost in blindness, the artists and curators leading these projects are aware of what is lost when we overly focus on sight and what can be gained by the unique experience of blindness. When they take the lead on artistic and curatorial production, everyone stands to gain.

‘Beyond the Visual’, is on view at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, 28 November 2025 until 19 April 2026.

_{Main image: David Johnson with fabrication support from Emma Dickson, Nuggets of Embodiment, 2024/25, stone plaster biscuits with braille text. Courtesy: the artist; photo: Rob Hill}