SHAPE 2017 TateExchange Book FINAL Draft - Flipbook - Page 18
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Creative Audio Description
Lynn Cox
Creative artistic audio description is key to bringing either old masters or
contemporary installations to life for visually impaired visitors.
How often, as a visually impaired artist, business woman, runner and mother
(who is juggling half a dozen tasks), have I gone to a specific descriptive tour
of an exhibition and wasted half a day because the audio describer doesn’t
know anything about the ‘Why’ of the composition, or the processes behind
the creation of the work. Often poor artistic audio describers will concentrate
on the historical context, the artist’s biography and how the artwork appears
on a superficial level – most of this information I can now get from the
internet without going into the gallery.
What I want from an audio describer is the initial sense of the artwork, the
overall composition, how the eye is drawn towards different elements, how
the brush strokes were applied and the effect from using that technique,
which materials were used and how that affects the understanding of the
artwork, etc.
So what can artists, galleries and museums do to invigorate the imagination
of their visually impaired visitors?
Less is More!
One of the worst examples of artistic audio description I’ve come across
was at a major British gallery about 15 years ago. There was an exhibition of
Mondrian paintings, which were abstract, consisting of different coloured
blocks and diagonal intervening stripes. Accepted that these types of
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