Start Making Sense: Visionary Sight

What happens when an artist’s sight begins to disappear?

In the first of three episodes of Start Making Sense, sociologist Professor Tom Shakespeare explores how sight loss changes the way artists experience the world and create art. From Edgar Degas’s increasingly abstract paintings as his eyesight deteriorated, to contemporary British painter Angela Charles, who uses technology, memory and her remaining vision to paint, Tom asks whether losing one sense can open us up to different ways of making art.

Blind photographer Pete Eckert reveals how he uses sound, touch and memory to construct extraordinary photographs without seeing a scene, while sculptor Aaron McPeake invites gallery visitors to touch, strike and listen to his work. He doesn't believe that art is something we simply look at.

Along the way, writer and disability studies scholar Georgina Kleege challenges some of the myths surrounding blindness and prompts us to reconsider what we take for granted about how art should be experienced.

In Start Making Sense, Tom explores the role of the senses through the work of disabled artists, past and present.

Presenter: Tom Shakespeare
Producer: Emily Uchida Finch
Exec Producer: Mark Rickards
Sound Design: Brian McNamara
A Whistledown production for BBC Radio 4