[Art_beyond_sight_learning_tools] Mother and daughter's touching vision of the world

[Shelley L. Rhodes]

The Herald (UK)
Friday, March 11, 2005

Mother and daughter's touching vision of the world

By ANNE JOHNSTONE

March 11 2005 - Nuala Watt often finds that sighted people assume she can 
see very little, when the reality is that she has both a complex sensory 
perception of the world around her and a rich inner eye. Now an English and 
creative writing student at St Andrews University, she shares that 
distinctive vision through her poetry. At the same time, her mother, Liz 
Munro, a former lecturer in textiles at Glasgow School of Art, has decided 
to embark upon a series of prints celebrating her daughter's creativity and 
exploring how the visually impaired experience the world.

An ongoing dialogue between mother and daughter culminated in a 
collaboration that has just landed the £5000 judges' prize in an inaugural 
exhibition at the Royal College of Art. Sense and Sensuality is the 
brainchild of BlindArt, a charity that encourages the participation and 
interaction of the visually impaired in the sighted domain of the visual 
arts.
Her print, Head, depicts a girl wearing a red hat and black shirt. The head 
is blurred and the red from the hat has bled, covering her eyes. By 
contrast, the flock pattern on the shirt is in sharp detail and is 
deliberately tactile. Nuala's accompanying poem, Birdsong, which also 
appears in a braille version, is about the expressive modes open to her as a 
disabled artist and the isolation she felt as a disabled adolescent coping 
with the double whammy of cerebral palsy and limited sight. "Art for the 
visually impaired tends to be about getting us to appreciate what sighted 
people see. I'm curious about that but it's difficult to explain because you 
don't know what I see. I'm trying to show disability as a positive and 
legitimate alternative artistic vision," she says.
More than 400 works from both sighted and visually-impaired artists were 
submitted for the BlindArt show, which is destined to become an annual 
event, and 80 were chosen. The judges' vote for Watt and Munro was 
unanimous. The pair plan to use the prize, presented by arts minister 
Estelle Morris, to fund a more ambitious multi-sensory work, involving 
Nuala's younger sister, Vari.
"Even when she was tiny, before we knew she had a problem with her eyesight, 
Nuala loved touch," says Munro. "I remember her sitting in the family 
ironing mountain, feeling the fabrics. She always seemed to inhabit rich 
imaginary worlds. I spent a lot of time trying to describe things to her 
and, as she matured, this became a conversation about abstract ideas and our 
inner sense of the world. Now we're looking forward to working on some of 
those inner landscapes."



http://www.theherald.co.uk/features/35040-print.shtml




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