Art by and for Blind People

Art by and for Blind People

Susanna Millar
Department of Experimental Psychology

University of Oxford



When I first asked a group of young blind children to draw something for me, they were incredulous. Did I not know that they could not see? But once they had felt the raised marks they could produce by drawing with a biro on plastic sheets placed on a flexible underlay, they had fun. Not only that. All but the youngest produced quite recognizable schematic human figures, when told to draw themselves or a friend. None of them had ever had vision, and none had ever drawn before. That may sound surprising. But, contrary to conventional wisdom, vision is not necessary for using spatial features to symbolize or recreate what we feel, think, want to express, or simply want to 're-present'.



The notion that vision is necessary for art stems from the common, but mistaken, identification of spatial perception with vision. Art, including drawing and painting, depends on creating lines, curves, shapes, and spatial patterns, much as creating music depends on notes, and poetry on words. Vision is indeed specialized for perceiving shapes through light and color, as hearing is for sounds, and touch for the texture, heat, cold and pressure cues by which materials are perceived. Sensory specialization adds biologically useful distinctions. But sensory specialization would be worse than useless if the modalities did not also overlap and converge. Biological organisms like us are endowed lavishly with apparently redundant systems that have similar functions. Touch, or rather touch in combination with movement, is another powerful modality for perceiving and creating the dots, lines, curves and patterns that form shapes and spatial configurations. These features are spatial because they have extension, length, direction, distance and location in virtue of their relation to reference cues. In vision, spatial reference depends largely on cues from the external environment. Spatial reference in touch and movement is more dependent on body-centered, gravitational and posture cues. Vision and touch normally function together, and provide combined spatial information. In these conditions, both specialized color and light cues from vision, and specialized texture, temperature and pressure cues from touch and movement, enhance common spatial features and help to identify unfamiliar objects.



The main spatial advantage of vision over its total absence is that external as well as body-centered reference cues are present in vision, so that both can be used in conjunction. Blind conditions do not automatically provide external reference cues. Spatial coding is equally possible, because gravitational cues are present, and the body provides an important reference frame. Sounds are the most common source of external reference in walking without vision. But for sculptures, and three-dimensional art, a square base with differentiated sides provides external cues that make it easier for the blind visitor to appreciate the spatial relations of features of the art object without having to remember precisely how far she has moved around the object. Representations in drawing and painting can be given the same dual advantage as vision by providing external frames, or actual surrounds. The composition of representative features, their locations, distances and directions in two-dimensional art forms can then be specified spatially relative to the frame in conjunction with self-referent cues.



In the total absence of vision, many of the special functions that colors and gradients of light contribute in vision can be, and are taken over by differences in materials, moldings showing different levels, to represent larger scale space, and by texture gradients. An instance that I once encountered were gradations in the size of pebbles on a canvas, diminishing in size from the top and from the bottom to the smallest grains in the middle of the canvas. The gradients conveyed spatial distance and depth to touch as well as to vision.



The notion of representation has often had rather pejorative connotations since the advent of photography. But art depends on the skill with which an idea is represented or ‘realized’, as well as on the intrinsic value of the idea. It is not necessarily immediately obvious how an object, person, or space that we want to represent – for whatever reason – can be produced. It requires abstraction, inference and symbolic activities. The drawings of young children are instructive. The youngest only produce scribbles. But all young children, and that includes blind children who have never seen or drawn pictures of the human figure before, sooner or later use a circle for the head, and lines for arms and legs. No head is a circle in either vision or touch. But a circle is the simplest two-dimensional shape that can be used to represent an important aspect of these three-dimensional visual objects. It is also the simplest shape that can represent the configuration traced by the movements needed to explore actual heads haptically. Discovering a pictorial solution – and for the blind children, mentioned earlier, it was a discovery – depended on the realization that simple two-dimensional shapes, lines and spatial arrangements can be used symbolically. Feedback from the raised line configurations that drawings produce eventually leads to further refinements in spatial representations.



It is also necessary to highlight some differences in the means by which touch and movement achieve the same, or concordant, shape and spatial effects as vision. In active touch, production is easier than recognition. The congenitally totally blind children mentioned earlier, who produced quite recognizable human figures, had great difficulty in recognizing a schematic human figure from raised line drawings, when they did not know in advance what the marks were supposed to represent. That is a complete reversal of the usual finding in vision. It is notoriously much easier to recognize even quite complex visual figures than to draw them. Indeed, good sight is no guarantee that one can produce what one sees. The reversal of effects can be traced to the importance of movement information in the haptic (touch and movement) modality.



The fact that production may be easier than recognition in the haptic modality is important in practice, if the aim is to help blind people to appreciate new exhibits or works of art. The majority of visually impaired people have some residual vision, or earlier visual experience. Residual light perception can be a sufficient external cue for orientation. More to the point, even minimal light perception can be used playfully, or artistically to produce contrasts. Familiarity with forms or spatial representations that have been, or are likely to be used symbolically makes it easier to recognize and understand what is being shown. But for blind people, who have had no prior experience of vision, nor of symbolic spatial representations, providing the means by which they can solve representational problems actively for themselves through touch and movement, is likely to be the best introduction to discovering and enjoying the so-called 'visual' arts.



Raised line spatial representations are, of course, also important in facilitating blind people’s access to museums and art exhibitions for the much more mundane reason that they can be used to provide maps for these venues. Small-scale replicas of the layout at the entrance may provide a welcome overview of the building and exhibition rooms. But it cannot be carried with you. Raised line embossed maps, by contrast, giving the location of different exhibits in a room, have precisely the same uses for the blind as visual maps have for the sighted. They give prior information which, in conjunction with verbal commentaries, makes such information more concrete. But map reading is a learned skill in touch, as it is in vision. To be useful, tactile maps have to be simple, well explained, and much less dense or cluttered than visual maps. The maps also need adequate keys giving the meaning of symbols used for specific items (entrances, exits, facilities) in Braille. Most important for making the spatial information contained in tactile maps accessible, however, are external surrounding (raised line) frames and directional arrows to which each symbol in the map can be related systematically, and ideally, via the map to tactile arrows on the walls.



Why then, when we have music, poetry and verbal descriptions, do we need a language that uses shapes and lines and spatial patterns, distances, directions and locations as its vocabulary? The answer in the end must simply be that spatial representations by whatever means, not least by drawing and painting, provide one more dimension of creativity, knowledge and enjoyment that is accessible also in the absence of vision.



Susanna Millar, Ph.D., Hon. D. Litt, AFBPsS is an Oxford University Research Lecturer in the Psychology Department. Her research subjects include child development, cross-modal issues, and on spatial perception and memory through touch and movement. Her current experiments and publications are on perceptual illusions that occur in touch as well as in vision, and on mapping and reference effects.



Further reading:



Millar, S. (1994). Understanding and Representing Space: Theory and evidence from studies with blind and sighted children. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN 0 19 852142 1.



Millar, S. (1997). Reading by Touch. (1997). London & N.Y.: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-06837-1; 0-415-06837-x (pbk).