Journal of Arts & Communities - Current Issue

This article explores ‘becoming blind’ as a complex process that extends beyond vision loss to encompass cultural, emotional and creative dimensions. Drawing on disability studies by scholars like Georgina Kleege and Alison Kafer, it examines how blindness has influenced the author’s work in vision-centric fields like art and design, challenging conventional narratives that frame blindness solely as a form of loss. Instead, the article presents blindness as a source of curiosity, invention and aesthetic richness, engaging with themes such as the cultural fear of darkness, the creative potential in ‘breaking’ visual norms like sharpness and clarity, and the tactile ways of experiencing space and contour. It reflects on how blindness reshapes identity, artistic practice and understandings of disability within able-bodied frameworks. Ultimately, the article advocates for expanding art and design practices to include disabled and blind perspectives, valuing blindness as a generative, transformative way of engaging with the world.

This article explores how transdisciplinarity might offer a helpful conceptual framework for taking seriously how artistic curiosities and desires converge around questions of access. My suggestion is that artists working at the borderlines of disability justice do so not only in the interest of a more inclusive, just society – but also to rediscover their working processes in new and unfamiliar configurations and collaborations. In making this point, I pursue what Natalie Loveless calls the ‘polydisciplinamory’ nature of contemporary research-creation – i.e., an eros-driven curiosity about how things are made, and a renewed care for the specificities of their sensuous form.

What if artists premised their artistic practice on the assumption that their audience or the audience that mattered, were Deaf, Disabled or Mad? How would we approach our work then? Starting with this main question, my work as an artist is focused on centring my own access needs, both as an artist and viewer, while also striving to create work that is accessible to others. My own neurodiversity draws me towards abstract gestures and forms, so I developed a framework to create works of art, interdependently with other Crip and Mad artists. This short entry describes how this method was developed and a manifesto detailing this creative framework. I have also included several images of collaborative works generated through this method.

Some of the current art haptic practices offered to the blind use touch as a substitute for sight, contributing to perpetuate an ocularcentric and thus ableist paradigm in the arts. This article draws from the need to elevate the sense of touch to a genuine source of knowledge and eradicate the conception of being a complement of sight. In particular, the aim is to show how sculpture tactile encounters led by artist Lucia Beijlsmit can enrich the artistic experience of sighted and non-sighted participants and reflect upon the functions of touch in art appreciation. This shared exploratory exercise did not actually feel as ‘access’ but rather as a form of close and personal communication. This is why this project entails a notion of access not conceived as a service provided to fix a problem, but as a form of human connection.

This article reports on findings from a practice-based Ph.D. project where the study explored the lived experience of women living with a disability, specifically Raynaud’s phenomenon, to inform a fashionable knitwear collection called Re-dress, and contribute to current discourse on disability, clothes and fashion design. Raynaud’s is triggered by the cold or a drop in atmospheric temperature, high levels of anxiety or stress, causing the narrowing of the blood vessels. Such an ‘attack’ causes numbness, pain, fatigue, dexterity and mobility issues. Raynaud’s is usually managed by keeping warm using appropriate clothing; however, the research identified a range of ‘design issues’ within existing clothing products. Some fail to mitigate the effects of cold and poor circulation effectively and others have limited appeal in terms of aesthetics. The project adopted a human-centred design approach, where participants’ desires and needs guide the design process. Qualitative data were gathered via semi-structured interviews and a focus group to develop and create the Re-dress capsule collection. The collection was then assessed by participants and feedback interviews were carried out, which this article discusses. Receiving feedback on the collection was important to gauge the success of the design interpretations. The research highlights that balancing performance with aesthetics is key to promote health and well-being; aesthetics supports social engagement for a multidimensional experience, as aesthetics is fundamental to enhance wearer’s pleasurable and inclusive experiences on a personal and public dimension; trying items of clothing highlights key design features for disability which increases wearer–product interaction to enhance agency and ownership, and attention is in the detail when designing suitable clothes for disabled people that wear them. The Re-dress capsule collection explicitly outlines how to marry performance, aesthetics and sensorial modalities in a garment.

The term disability poetics is often used to describe poetry that is simply about disability. Drawing from the concepts of against-access and cripping the arts, the present article explores the current limitations of disability poetics and suggests the implementation of visual arts accessibility practices as one path towards expanding the notion of what disability poetics can encapsulate. The article then introduces an excerpt from the author’s book Hardly Creatures (Tin House, 2025), a collection of poems that uses the metaphorical form of an accessible art gallery to make its own attempt at translating the aforementioned visual arts accessibility practices across disciplines into poetic practice.

Psychology and cognition scholar Howard Gardner’s concept of ‘fruitful asynchrony’ provides the foundation for the author to understand her own interdisciplinary work between critical design, engineering and disability studies. The author introduces her own framework of ‘disposition, language, house’ as a further heuristic to understand the interdisciplinary nature of design theory and practice.

Lumpy Bed is an accessible crip-lounge installation built for the Bay Area Now 9 Triennial. This vibrant chartreuse sculptural landscape, composed of soft, undulating mounds invites communal rest. Carved upholstery foam covered in non-toxic rubber paint is squishy, like a stress-ball for your body – prioritizing the comfort and support of disabled bodies in public spaces. The 8-foot circular bed encourages rest and relaxation, challenging institutional furniture and somatic norms while promoting inclusivity. Through rest performances and physical repairs, the artist engages with the complexities of support and repair, reflecting on the ongoing need for adaptive care of both works of art and the disabled body. Lumpy Bed serves as a prototype towards accessible design and inclusive rest, challenging the norms of our built environment that often does not consider or meet the needs of the disabled body.

In this article, I draw on a developing body of archival research into disability arts in Australia to consider how changes in training, production and presentation, accessibility, funding, politics, aesthetics and audience engagement practices have influenced the development of disciplinary and transdisciplinary work in the field. Disability arts in Australia is recognized globally for its innovation and impact. Efforts to document this legacy as part of the Australian Research Council funded The Evolution of Disability Arts in Australia project have highlighted the challenge of tracing the history of historically marginalized artists who have not always had the time, space, platforms and support to create work or hold collections recording the creation of that work in formats, modes and media meaningful to the creators. These challenges notwithstanding, records of companies and recollections of practitioners collected during this project are providing insight into when, where and how artists have produced work. More critically, they are showing how changes in policy, funding, training, development and creative development opportunities, and platforms for disabled artists to take a leadership role have served as a generative, reductive or exploitative force shaping the evolution of performing and visual arts work. This includes differences in the development of performing and visual arts practices. In this article, I consider how reflecting on this history, and the way it has produced a range of a practices – disciplinary and transdisciplinary, personal, social and political, ensemble and individual, in a range of relationships to mainstream theatres, galleries and museums – can assist in understanding how the celebrated body of work for which Australian disabled artists have become known has evolved, and how policy-makers can support these artists to continue to innovate in future.