Beyond the Visual - Multisensory modes of beholding art | Book Launch

Book Launch Invitation

Hosted at the:

Wellcome Collection

183 Euston Road, London, NW1 2BE

Join us and hear from Editors Professor Ken Wilder and Dr Aaron McPeake, along with other contributors.

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.

Publisher UCL Press

The book accompanies the exhibition Beyond the Visual

The exhibition continues:

28 November 2025 - 19 April 2026

Sculpture Galleries and Study Gallery

Henry Moore Institute, Leeds

Https://henry-moore.org/whats-on/beyond-the-visual/

Beyond the Visual is the UK’s first major sculpture exhibition where blind and partially blind artists are not just exhibiting but shaping the curatorial process itself, and where visitors are invited to touch, hear, and smell the art, radically rethinking how exhibitions are experienced.

The exhibition represents the culmination of a 3 year long, £250,000 AHRC-funded research project led by University of the Arts London (UAL), Shape Arts and the Henry Moore Institute around accessibility in the arts.

Beyond the Visual is an exemplar of how an arts university can drive long-term, interdisciplinary research collaborations with national institutions. It seeks to set new standards for how cultural and educational institutions champion and support disabled students and artists.

Principal Investigator: Professor Ken Wilder, UAL Professor of Aesthetics and Rootstein Hopkins Chair of Design at Chelsea College of Arts.

Co-Investigator: Dr Aaron McPeake, Associate Lecturer, Chelsea College of Arts.