Art is often a domain that is inaccessible to the visually impaired. As a result, this community can feel marginalized, silenced, and neglected. Too often we rely solely on the visitor’s sense of sight to create meaning from a piece of art. CONTACT aims to bring awareness to the necessity of including the visually impaired in the art community by creating art that can be enjoyed through sight and touch.

As a partially blind artist, I’m interested in exploring new ways of making art accessible to those who have visual impairments. Extracting inspiration from the Inkblot series, the CONTACT series aims to expand on themes of vision, perception, and the meaning-making process by activating the viewer’s ability to make sense of art through unique tactile interactions. These kits were created to reflect on the experience of touch in relation to Braille text, and to introduce Braille decoding to sighted viewers.

The CONTACT kits come with a tactile painting, an embossed booklet, interactive Braille pieces to read and decode, and a Braille translation of the English text describing the instructions and meaning of the project.