David Johnson (RCA) - 2020-21 Students

Blind Aesthetics: Ways of (Not) Seeing (Memory, Materiality, and the Plurality and Synaesthetics of the Senses)

Contemporary visual bias obscures the existence and force of sight-independent visualisation and imaging. Working sculpturally in concrete, clay, latex and digital sound environments, my (blind) art practice dramatically shifts away from this visual bias by creating specific sensorial connections between memory, materiality and neural pluralities. It asks to what extent blindness can reveal a different approach to the visual, one that is no longer primarily attached to the haptic. This research extends the work of disability gain theorists (Kleege/Thompson) providing new ways of (not) seeing.