Sight, in most societies, dominates all the senses. The old adage “seeing is believing”, succinctly identifies an almost universal attitude towards this faculty. Sighted people determine truth, if they didn’t see it themselves, by asking for eyewitnesses or empirical evidence. The perceptions of people without vision are given little credence.

Those of us with vision tend to rely on little else so our other senses remain under developed. Our intellect, in this regard, is insufficiently engaged as we often look without thinking, and believe what we see. It can be argued that we have allowed our gaze to become lazy under the constant barrage of computers, television and film that tell us what to think and where to look. We have become so accustomed to the ever increasing pace of the Internet, TV advertisements, video and DVD games, that seeing has become a passive occupation. Images may register but knowledge is not always brought to bear.

This passive means of viewing and interacting with the world has consequences on the way we engage with art. Bruce James asks: "Are we now so pictorially saturated – through painting, film, video, TV, computers and the multiple new media and screen technologies – that our eyes, and to some extent our hands, crave another kind of stimulation altogether?”1 He suggests the answer lies in the three dimensionality of sculpture, “its tactility (offering) a palliative for sickened sensibilities". Why stop with one art form and the engagement of one sensory faculty? The “palliative for sickened sensibilities” would surely be immersion in a wholistic sensory engagement with art.
Imagine a room full of art works engaging all the senses, intoxicating the visitor with a sensorium of sights, smells, tastes, textures, and sounds. Even a person with profound sensory impairments would fail to leave unaltered. This is the intention of Grapple. Through the activation of all of an individual's learning faculties, Grapple enables them to connect with the artwork and with the intentions of the artist. It reaches out to a group within our society to whom galleries and art rarely, if ever, have been accessible – the vision impaired. It endeavours to re-engage members of the general public alienated by contemporary art, and allow works of sensory art to be fully realized within the traditional “look but do not touch" environment of gallery spaces.

The Grapple artists invite engagement with their work on various levels. Some ask the audience to suspend thought processes and immerse themselves in a sensory experience. Others ask the audience to use their senses to consider ideas and comments, as well as engage their cognitive skills more consciously. All the artists employ the senses of the audience with purpose – to communicate the intentions of their art making.

Alan Valentine’s Sea Gongs invite interaction on a tactile, auditory and visual level. Made from a combination of recycled hardwoods, metals and glass, they provide when touched a diversity of temperatures, textures, vibrations and sounds. Organic in shape but mechanical in nature they are the synthesis of man-made and natural materials and processes. Such juxtaposition creates illusion: man– made "natural looking" objects; simple constructions posing as masterpieces of craftsmanship; the veneer of preciousness hiding a robust structure. While primarily sculptural these objects have an interactive function – to be touched, to make noise and to stimulate the senses.

In his artwork, Ryan Dunshea endeavours to create a sensory experience for his audience that moves them beyond the physicality of the object alone.
“It’s the pleasure of activating all the senses, of activating your sight, of activating your touch, when you experience an artwork. It’s better than just looking at a painting on the wall that you can’t touch; you’re blocked from the experience. As soon as you’re able to touch it, experience it and feel it, it totally changes everything because it’s not the object. It’s the experience that’s more important.”2
His large rope wall sculptures, entitled Threads, are based on a counting system of Peruvian indigenous tribes. They are indicative of his fascination with ancient and modern tactile systems of communication, such as the knot alphabet and different forms of braille and sign language. In capturing an essence of these systems in his artwork, their history and methodologies, Ryan recovers a lost past. In bringing them alive through audience engagement he activates a sense that normally lies dormant when engaging with art. His work reminds us that touch is an important component of communication, albeit one that our society has sought to confine to certain social settings, and that art is a significant form of personal and public communication.

Stephen Weis’ "quest", as he calls it, is to give audiences’ a sense of empowerment – not by telling them what to do through art, but by showing them they can do it. He describes his art piece The Soaring Sole Toneaphone as a scientific experiment in vibration; a sculptural sound piece constructed from the found objects and recycled materials of an engineer’s workshop. He considers current art ideologies and artistic conventions irrelevant to his practice. He strives to move beyond the intellect, seeking a place before contemplation – a place of sensations and creativity. He does this by working intuitively, deliberately throwing his work into chaos, embracing the unexpected results and actively exploring the creative process. By removing art’s rational and intellectual layers Stephen’s aim is to demystify it. At the same time, by exposing its creative core, his desire is to reveal its mystique.
Similarly, Candace Miles endeavours to make art increasingly accessible in her installation of See Stars. A work of multiples, of limited hues and strong contrasting blacks and whites, silvers and dark greys, it was created specifically for the vision impaired. The overriding symbol in the work is the celestial star, its five–point shape resonating with that of the star fish Candace chose as the basis for her work. In centering her work on these highly textured, sensate and eyeless sea creatures, Candace alludes to their dependence on other senses – senses that human beings either do not share or no longer use. This situation reflects that of the vision impaired, who exist, in a society where, of the senses, vision dominates and there is little regard or value for alternative sensory means.
The celestial star, as a seemingly mysterious and untouchable entity, also informs the philosophy behind the work – the endeavour to reach for that which seems unobtainable. Art has been something of a celestial star to the vision impaired, mostly unobtainable and, to almost everyone, untouchable. Candace endeavours to remove this barrier by creating a work that allows people to touch, smell and be surrounded by art.

Sebastian Di Mauro takes commonplace domestic materials such as carpet underlay, stainless steel pot scourers and Astroturf and transforms them into objects of gentle excitement and fun. Hide, Lair, Pump, Filter, Curl and Stretch are ambiguous friendly shapes that are at once both strange and familiar. Whilst their materials are easily recognizable, when given new forms they become animated, taking on the illusion of new textures and colours. This ambiguity is important as it emphasizes the connection between man-made and natural worlds. From this perspective, art, nature and everyday life are not seen as disparate entities, but as interconnected.
The presence and physicality of the pieces are further enhanced when smell is introduced. In Grapple, Sebastian uses carpet underlay in the pieces Filter and Pump to trigger the olfactory sense. The jute of the carpet underlay represents his interest in natural fibres. It stands as a metaphor for that which is unique and wonderful and lies hidden beneath the ordinary and everyday. The strong musty scent of the jute can trigger memories, reminding audiences of the piece’s origin before their extraordinary metamorphosis within the gallery environment.

Christine Prescott also uses smell’s strong link with memory as a way of heightening audiences engagement with her artwork. Ocean Song has stitched dehydrated strawberries over the armature of sheep ribs and a fox jaw, bound with beeswax, and human hair. Christine chooses materials that “possess the aura she wants the artwork to express.” 3 The materials are chosen as a chef would choose an ingredient for a recipe – the material must blend with other materials and suit the processes employed. Every step is essential to the final smell of the work and how it will be received by the olfactory sense of the visitor. Christine’s work also has a medicinal quality and purpose. It has been made to ward off the fear of decay and transience as each of the materials used contains the memory of the creative process. In addition, these materials create new memories through the scents they produce. They are both the keepers and producers of memory – igniting, creating and containing them.

In her work Think Something Else, Liz Wood challenges our social attitude to the sense of smell. When human beings evolved to walking on two legs, their noses were no longer close to the ground, and smell ceased to govern the way they perceived the world. Leaving "sniffing" to the animals, our reliance on smell diminished and our dependence on the visual increased. As a "civilized" society we have continued to distance ourselves from our animal origins and its associations with smell. We place little importance on smell, relegating it to the lower echelons of the senses. Perhaps we resent its ability to provoke us into unexpected, often emotional, sometimes instinctive, reactions. We undermine it by repressing and masking natural odours with deodorants, perfumes and cleansers. Liz exposes our hypocrisy with her installation of real and artificial flowers. So real are the artificial that only smell will distinguish the difference. She reminds us that it is not only when our sight is impaired that we are left to rely on smell. In the case of this work, seeing is not believing, it is smell that is the indicator of what is real or true.

In a move away from focusing solely on the sensory, Ross Barber wants audiences to engage in the "second order of perception" – the meaning of a work of art. " In truth, this second order of perception is the most important, the meaning of a work of art which once made visible tells us its real value – its cultural value," 4 Ross questions the dominance of vision; its ability to divert us from reading art and to exclude certain groups in the engagement and representation of art. He also explores the broader issue of who has representation within history and the cultural value they are accorded. Ross orchestrates these concerns in his work The Rope which was inspired by the story of the 1859 suicide of a young assistant of the artist Edouard Manet. Two versions of the tale are told: Manet’s version and that of the assistant’s mother, whose story within history, as a working class woman, would rarely be represented. One version is told in braille and the other is spoken. While the braille reader may have access to a version of the story the visual reader doesn’t, neither is offered the complete story. Equally, no one has visual supremacy when engaging with the work. With strong lights reflecting off the translucent braille tablets and the embedded objects being distorted, the work is difficult to perceive. By offering only imperfect readings and flawed views of the work Ross alludes to the inconsistencies and malleable "truths" that exist within representations of history and art, creating what he calls cultural blind spots. He raises his concern about our preoccupation with visual encounters and reluctance to engage our intellect. We therefore easily accept flawed versions of history and allow them to inform how we see the world.

Those of us with vision will and can enjoy art on a visual level, but by bringing to the fore our other senses, our perceptions are heightened and we partake in an entirely different experience of art. For people without vision there are few options. When it comes to describing artworks to someone who has never seen a painting or a 3D artwork, words can often be inadequate. Occasionally exhibitions have, or galleries supply, support material that caters to the needs of the vision impaired, such as braille catalogues or audiotapes, or, as with the National Gallery, a tactile booklet on works in the collection. Every once in a while an exhibition such as Grapple is created that caters to their needs and allows a full engagement with the artworks.

Exhibitions like Grapple, however, respond to more than just the needs of the vision impaired. They offer a palliative for the sickened sensibilities of the broader gallery-going public. They give us something real to engage with. We can use our hands, noses, tongues, or ears, as well as eyes when we engage with the work. Therefore, they jolt us out of our passive habits of viewing and force us to engage more consciously with the art. While levels of engagement to this degree are not possible with all artwork, there is a need to rethink the way we produce, exhibit and experience art. Grapple, and exhibitions like it, challenge the predominant influence of vision on the way galleries present and audiences engage with art. Most significantly, they stimulate neglected means of gaining insight.
Jacquelyn Murphy,
August 2002

1 James B: Review: On The Sculptural in Australian Culture, Radio National, Arts Today, Tuesday 13 November, 2001, quote in Fathoming: Contemporary Australian Sculpture ex catalogue, RGAQ Travelling Exhibition 2002
2 Crocker S. Entering Cantus Brink @ Artwrite No.17 p6
3 Prescott C. Notes from the artist, 2002
4 Barber R. Notes from the Artist, 2002

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