Blindness is both the instrument and the object of the blind author’s art practice that leads this research thesis. As such this art and this thesis is as much of blindness as it is about blindness. Whether it is the floating touch-points of the Transient Object (2019) rendered in 3D print; or whether it is the image of thought generated in the mind of the beholder in the mirrored jigsaw puzzle Blind I Stand… (2020); or whether it is the vacillating musical tones that eddy and flow around the body of the visitor to the sound piece Alarming Proximity (2019), all of these artworks delineate and describe a blind-life currency, an economy of the visible and the invisible that is constitutive of the blind aesthetic that is proposed by this research. The blind aesthetic or blind modality that emerges from this research has its own expressive language. This language celebrates the positive and generative aspects of blindness rather than striving to overcome the impediments that blindness presents in our contemporary ocularcentric society. As such, this work amplifies the work of contemporary disability-gain theorists Georgina Kleege and Hannah Thompson. These theorists are in turn, key members of the contemporary critical disability studies community. The thesis starts by introducing the important concept of anamnesis. Anamnesis is a form of pre-experiential, latent, embodied knowledge. Anamnesis is the idea that the knowledge of seeing or sight is prior to actually seeing. Furthermore, anamnesis as prior knowledge allows for blindness to be integral to seeing or sight. The works of Jacques Derrida (1967 - 1990) and Jean François Lyotard (1993 - 1997) have been particularly helpful in articulating anamnesis and the powerful contribution it makes to the argument to blind aesthetics. Chapter 2 of the thesis proposes that our epistemological lives consist of a fluxing, aesthetic currency and that, following Tobin Seibers (2008), this currency is essentially complex and embodied. Guided by the writings of Martin Heidegger (1953), Johnny Golding (2010) and Tim Ingold (2020) the thesis goes on to argue that this life-currency is regulated and articulated not only by anamnesis but also by the twin concepts of Attunement and the Comma. Chapter 3 examines the relationship between the spoken word and mental imagery. With the help of recently revived ideas on extreme imagination it is argued here that there is discontinuity between the mental image and the organs of sense. The final chapter of the thesis conducts a thorough survey of original blind artworks and blind-life experiences that consolidate the arguments used so far in the thesis. The questions that have guided this research are: To what extent and in what ways might art made by a blind person contribute to a new epistemological paradigm around vision? To what extent and in what ways might this new paradigm impact on both the visually impaired and wider communities? With the help of these questions this research proposes a radical rethink where blindness and blind experience is inherently complex and more contingently determined than previously thought. A far more integrated and distributed sensorium is proposed; here the coupling of modes of experience and their sense organs is more fluid and plastic than previously realised. Blindness, vision and visuality now expand into a realm way beyond the workings of just the eye and the brain.

Funder: LAHP - AHRC [2394985]