Making Braille Art

Joeita Gupta:
I'm Joeita Gupta, and this is The Pulse. Years ago, I had my first and only brush with making art, the kind of art that someone displays in a gallery, complete with artist statement and a reception where your friends come and look. Obviously, that didn't make me an artist, but what I did take away from the experience was a genuine appreciation for the versatility of braille. It was the first time I thought of braille as artistic. Of course, braille is a language and it has been a game changer for people who are blind if you'd excuse the understatement, but braille can also be beautiful, not just to the touch, but it turns out also visually. Today, we discuss braille as art. It's time to put your finger on the pulse.
Hello and welcome to The Pulse on AMI-audio. I'm Joeita Gupta joining you from the Accessible Media Studios in Toronto. Today, I have my hair in a ponytail. It's a little scraggly, I apologize, but who's really interested in the back of my head anyways, and I have a pair of black headphones, and I'm wearing a V-neck shirt. It's a T-shirt, really in a rose pink and it has short cap sleeves. So, I'm really excited to talk to you and talk to Clarke Reynolds today because he's our artist. He's called the Blind Braille artist and he's got an amazing website, seeingwithoutseeing.com. He also hosts his own podcast and he's joining us today all the way from the UK and I'm really delighted to welcome Clarke to the program. Clarke, hello and welcome to The Pulse. I'm so glad you could join us today.

Clarke Reynolds:
Thank you so much for inviting me, and Canada was my first over-trip holiday when I was 21. I did Canada 16 days from Toronto all the way to Vancouver, so Canada is an amazing place.

Joeita Gupta:
Oh, well, I'm so glad. I'm curious because I love the UK and I've travelled a lot to the UK. I love London and I've seen shows on the West End, so it's nice to know the feeling goes both ways and that you had a good time in Canada. I want to talk to you a little bit about how you got started with working with braille as an art form. Was there a singular moment when you realized that braille had artistic potential that you hadn't really come across before?

Clarke Reynolds:
It was strange because I've been an artist professionally now for 22 years. I knew I wanted to be a professional artist from age six being blind in one eye, and then I started to lose my sight in my 30s, that's come up to 10 years ago now, but it was always meant to be braille. For some reason, I used to always describe how I see, it's like looking for 1,000 dots, and so I was a big fan of pointillism. And then when I was given that diagnosis, "Oh, you're going blind, someone gave me a Braille Perkins typewriter. Now, I knew of braille. I felt it in lifts and things like that and then I didn't understand what it was all about, and then because I'm an artist, it was a code. So, I learned braille really quickly in three weeks and just a light bulb went off in my head. It's like, "Why can't this be an art form? Just like a typographer uses a letter, why can't I use a doc to host English language?" And that's how all game about really.

Joeita Gupta:
So, can you tell us a little bit about how you actually incorporate braille into your artwork? Is it that you have images and then you supplement those images with braille, or does the braille become the image?

Clarke Reynolds:
The braille becomes the image it. What's the age-old saying, a painting says 1,000 words? Literally, mine does. So with my artwork, I create stories about sight loss, the good, the bad, and the ugly of sight loss, and I transcribe them and they create imagery, but for me, it's the nature of the dot. It's such a pop art kind of style visually. I'm a visual artist, but the added bonus to me is you can physically touch my artwork, so it goes on both levels. So the braille dot, when you give loads of sentences out, what I find fascinating is the negative spaces because each piece is different, so that's what drives me in creating the artwork now.

Joeita Gupta:
So when you say negative spaces, are you talking about the space in between the braille dots?

Clarke Reynolds:
That's it. The misconception of what braille is, it's not about reading the individual dots, braille is a pattern, and when you blow that up, that individual dot up, the pattern comes more distinctive. So it's not about the gap between the dot, gap, dot, gap, so everything is squished together. So, there's no gaps between the dots when I blow it up. So, you can physically feel the pattern and what you're feeding is the negative spaces, so the maze within the maze of my artworks, and that's what I find fascinating. So, every piece is different because of the words I say.

Joeita Gupta:
And do the words you say always correspond to visual impairment or blindness, or do you explore other themes as well?

Clarke Reynolds:
I explore other themes, so they have a series called Fab to Touch Ice Lollies, they're about sight loss, about my journey, but then I did a series of Andy Warhol Marilyn Monroe prints, and they were called What Would Andy Warhol Say? So the idea is a visual aspect, you'll see that print, but a blind person would know more than you because they can read the artwork. So, it's giving power back to a vision-impaired person in a visual world.

Joeita Gupta:
And is it just raised dots on a white canvas or do you actually incorporate color into your artwork? Because you did say previously that you're a visual artist, so what role does colour play in your artwork?

Clarke Reynolds:
Colour plays an important role because foremost, I'm trying to show the visual world, this stimuli of colour, and that's how I started off braille. The idea is I want braille to be universal, and so I created a color-coded braille, so that allows everyone to access it through a key or by touch. So, it makes it enjoyable for everyone because on the one hand, when you go to a gallery, you only look at art for seven seconds. With my art, you spend 10, 15, 20 minutes decoding that piece and then you want to decode the others. So, you spent hours at my exhibitions, and that's the exciting part about my artwork.

Joeita Gupta:
Do people find that a novel experience? If someone's used to just standing in front of a piece of art for seven seconds and moving on, what sort of response do you get from audiences that have now spent 10 minutes before each individual work of art?

Clarke Reynolds:
Everyone loves it and obviously, children love it, and you are told when you go into a white box gallery and you see all this wonderful art, but there's loads of barriers in the way, you can't get close to it. Big signs my exhibition saying, you must touch the artwork, and that's really strange in that environment where you're touching it, and even though you can't read braille, the idea of just touching a piece of art and experiencing it in a new way breaks down the barriers and the elitism of art. Art is for everyone, and it's key to show people the power of art and the power of touch really.

Joeita Gupta:
What are you hoping that people will take away? You talked about breaking down the elitism of art. Above and beyond breaking down some of the conventional barriers that people have and not really touching the artwork or getting involved with the artwork, what else are you hoping that visitors to your exhibitions will take away in not just in terms of interacting with art and artwork, but maybe thinking differently about blindness and visual impairment as well?

Clarke Reynolds:
Oh, that is so key. So for me, especially in England, the idea of the word disability or blindness, now I was an artist before I lost my sight and I studied, I got my degrees, but because I lost my sight, my profession became a hobby for some reason in society's eyes because you have a disability. If you go into the creative industry, it's seen as a hobby, and that's really why I try to push back the boundaries within.
And also that tick box exercise where major galleries think that because they have to include a disabled artist in their exhibitions, I've become this fad. And I'm lucky enough now that the gallery that took me on, Quantus Gallery, don't see me like that. They see me as a world-class artist that's breaking down barriers and that my art artwork now is bought by collectors all around the world. My story is a powerful one, but foremost, I want to show the world that a blind person can compete in mainstream art. I'm as powerful as all those major artists like Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin. I take my experiences and I put it onto my canvas. It's just so happens that I use a braille dot to do that.

Joeita Gupta:
You mentioned you lost your vision nearly entirely about 10 years ago, but you've been an artist all your life. How has your artistic process evolved? We talked about how your artistic work has evolved, but is the way that you make art different now than it was 10 years ago, just because you are seeing less?

Clarke Reynolds:
It is, but I say I used to do pointillism, so I used to create 3D pointillism using wooden dowels. I did felt tips and chalk pastels and that lot. And when I started to lose my sight, it was really hard, obviously to do drawings and paintings if I can't physically react to it, even though I can't see my artwork because the nature of the tactility, the dots, the methodology of it, it's organic, is what's structured, and I like that. So for me, being part of my art with the words literally put my heart and soul on each piece of artwork I do is so rewarding, even though I don't see it. And the only way I see my artwork is at my exhibitions when people are engaging it, in fact talking about the artwork, and that's what excites me the most. Even though I'm 42 years old, when I create artwork when I go to exhibitions, I still feel like that 20-year-old experiencing art for the first time, so it's exciting.

Joeita Gupta:
Speaking of experiencing art, they say about writers that in order to be a good writer, you have to be a reader, and so how are you interacting with art yourself and not just someone as a creator of art, but also someone who is a consumer of art, do you find it challenging now to go into exhibitions and see art or interact with art given that you've lost your vision? Do some of the barriers that you are trying to alleviate through your art form continue to persist when you try to engage with other people's artwork?

Clarke Reynolds:
Oh, true. We live in a world made from visual people. You can't get around that. And when I go to a gallery, I didn't go to a gallery for nearly coming to 10 years with the diagnosis because audio description didn't give me the power, the access, the emotional response to art that I usually felt and I felt excluded. The audio description was quite patronizing. I don't want to be told in the left-hand corner there's a sun, and a right-hand corner there's green grass, that gives me nothing as a viewer.
So, that's why last year I teamed up with one of my friends, Steve, who call my talking guide dog, and we have a podcast called Art in Sight, where we literally go to galleries and have a conversation with art, have an emotional response to the art. I make him look at the art differently with someone who can see and it makes him question what the art is. So, we have a conversation with that piece, and that's really exciting. And unfortunately, I can't always take my guide dog to these places, but I'm hoping galleries and museums will start to think we live in a creative world, let's start thinking creatively about how we're describing the art form.

Joeita Gupta:
So, you feel that we should really get into a more conversational and discussion-based description rather than simply a factual description, this is on the top left side and this is on the bottom right-hand side? Are you saying that audio description also needs to evolve to try and capture more of the emotion in the artwork?

Clarke Reynolds:
It does, and also the voice. The voice plays a key role. Audiobooks are amazing. When you listen to it often, you're engrossed because they have high pitch and low pitch, but when you go to an audio description in a gallery, it's all one tone, it's all monotone, it's all off a script. There's no emotion, like I'm talking to you how excited I am about art and my passion. There's no passion coming through the voice. Now if they chose someone, you've got 90 seconds to grab my attention. In that 90 seconds, you want to tell a story. So, think about how you're going to tell that story within 90 seconds.

Joeita Gupta:
How do you tell a story in 90 seconds? That's a challenge I would imagine. What sort of artwork have you had a chance to visit when you did your podcast? What are some of the things that you've had a chance to take a look at for want of a better phrase?

Clarke Reynolds:
Oh, we looked at everything, and what I did with my guide dog, speaking guide dog, is he did no research. So, he went in there blind and we experienced the art for the first time together, so it was sculpture, it was paintings, it was textiles, contemporary art, it was portraiture, but the best one we went to was a sculpture part where you could physically touch everything. So, it was role reversal. I was describing the artwork to him because I was allowed to touch and that's the power of touch, and that was an amazing experience.

Joeita Gupta:
Oh, you know what, I should have asked you this earlier, but when you actually do your artwork and you have the braille dots, what are the dots made of?

Clarke Reynolds:
So, my dots are made out of free mill birch fitness, and they're two centimetres in diameter. So, two centimetres and one centimetre is a great size because it can still be read... Almost like speed touch with your hands. It's a great feeling, but also I don't always use a dot. So, one of my pieces I've just done recently, we just had massive coronation after losing a monarch after 70 years, so it was a big coronation, so I did the Union Jack, but the dots weren't dots, they were the silhouette of the king and queen and called, Oops, I Sang the Wrong Monarch. So it was the national anthem, but in braille, but the braille dots were the king and queen.

Joeita Gupta:
Wow. How much time does it take for you to create one of these works of art? I feel like the one related to the coronation must have taken quite a while, but in general, what sort of timeframe do you need to have to produce one of these works of arts?

Clarke Reynolds:
It does take a while. Like any artist, they would add their sketchbook and they would do their comparative drawings and colour sketches. So for me, first thing I'd do is work out what I would do. So with the Union Jack, I had to work out pixelated the Union Jack, and it was a hard flag because even when you can see it's not an identical mirror image flag. So, it's really confusing for the brain anyway, and then I had to work out the national anthem, so I composition with words. So once that was sorted out, and then working with the company that does my dots, working out those silhouettes that they fit into the structure. So, the whole thing took about a month to do, and then obviously the piece took around 40 hours to complete, and that's me standing eight hours at a time. When you are an artist, you start your work and then you forget to eat, you forget to drink, you're just in the zone.

Joeita Gupta:
Yes, it's true. Where is it now? Is it in Buckingham Palace hanging in the throne room?

Clarke Reynolds:
That would be amazing, so it was greatly at the Affordable Art Fair at Hampton and Heath and through Quantus Gallery, and now Quantus Gallery have got it, and I'm hoping a buyer will purchase it because it's a one-off, and that one to touch was beautiful. Could you imagine those silhouettes from the old Victorian era, how they did the old cameos? It was like that, and when I was feeding it, and the idea is because people don't look at art closely enough, they look from a distance, they just see this weird squiggle. So, when you get close and they realize it's a silhouette and then you touch it, it's a great feel. It's one of the best ones to feel.

Joeita Gupta:
Oh, I bet. I can just imagine the detail, that would've been fascinating. I'm jealous, my fingers are quivering because I'd have loved to have a feel myself. When I think about London, there are so many galleries and museums. The Victorian and Albert is of course very famous, the British Museum is excellent and they've made a lot of strides to make their exhibits and their collections more accessible. The British Museum has an audio description, think what you will of that, and they've got the gallery where you get replicas of everything and you can go and touch the columns and what have you. Do you think based on your artistic practice, some of these larger institutions could do more to make their collections more accessible?

Clarke Reynolds:
They can, and it doesn't have to cost a fortune. We talked about audio description at the start. That's a great, easy way to do that now, but accessibility doesn't have to be boring. It doesn't have to be, "Oh, it's got to be done this way because it's been done this way for the last 30, 50 years." We are creators. We should be pushing the boundaries of how to entice people. Especially for me, it's about the younger generation of vision-impaired children. Now, I'm the proud patron of the Charity Victor, which is the vision-impaired children's charity and young adults, that's amazing. I want them to go when they're younger and think, "Hang on a minute, I want to work in the creative industry. I want to be an artist, be a poet, be in front of the camera." So, we've got to entice them to make them go into these institutes thinking, I'm going to be excited about what I'm going to, about to see or hear or touch. Let's make it exciting.

Joeita Gupta:
I agree with you. Listen, I've been building suspense over the duration of the program. I know I'm eager to at least see some of your artwork, and I know the audience is likewise eager to see some of your amazing works of art. You're going to describe them for us, and we'll have the images up on the screen for the people who can see, we'll see, and the people who need the description will hear. So, why don't you go ahead and describe a couple of the pieces that we're going to look at today?

Clarke Reynolds:
Sure, so we talked about my colour-coded braille. Now, I created colour-coded braille, and it wasn't just random, wasn't like Damien Hirst just paints these colour dots as if. I looked at the commonality of letters appearing in words, and then used colour theory. So, you've mentioned you've got 26 colours and they've all got to be harmonious. So, somehow it took me a month to figure out this colour coordination, and people say to me about colour, how I can physically see colour. Well, I don't. I have a memory of colour, I have 30 years of memory. So, what I'm doing now is I'm using that memory, but then creating new memories to how I perceive colour now. So for instance, E is orange and R is blue because a lot of words ended ER, so they're complementary colours. So, I'm creating artwork... You see the decode and the braille piece.
It's basically like a painter paints a portrait or landscape using complementary shades of colour. I paint in words, so those two pieces, one is the decode and then one is the definition of braille in my colour-coded braille and they're great, and I love my colour-coded braille. It's because every piece is unique depending on the background, colour because that's how we perceive colour. The background changes colour even though it's the same colour that we used previously. So, I'm excited about going forward on that. The other piece is Journey by Dots, which I use neon-coloured dots. So, I wanted the gallery to be in the dark, and the only way for people to guide people through their experience was to use UV light and dots that glowed in a dark. So, you were guided by my art in a safe space because bright lights hurt my eyes as a blind person.
So, I wanted the gallery to be in the dark. So, that was a really emotional piece because it was part of an exhibition that I had at the gallery that inspired me as a six-year-old to become an artist, so that was really exciting. And then that came with a piece, which is a lightbox, which is braille, which I literally drilled thousands of holes into a piece of board, and that piece is all about how art saved my life and how art is my light as my world is getting darker. So, that was part of that journey by dots, which is really cool, and then following onto my Fab to Touch, which is at Quantus Gallery, which gave me my first big solo exhibition in London, which basically made me the artist I am today because it gave me a platform to shout about who I am and what I do.
And those pieces are inspired by Andy Warhol's soup cans, and the idea is he had the whose prints, and these are prints, but they can be touched and they all tell different stories, but the beauty is just changing the background colour, you perceive that story differently as a visual story, but a blind person when touching it will feel the same story, so they're excited. And then the other art... Well, not as an artwork, it's a photo of me meeting a young girl at a music festival who changed my life. Her name was Etta, and I was doing this braille trail with a group called Seekers Crate, and I bumped into her at a sea of 50,000 people, it was meant to be. And I had my braille suit on, which you can touch, and she asked if she could touch the suit and we got chatting.
And then her dad asked me, "Why do you want to touch the man's suit?" And Etta said, "Because I'm blind." Now as a blind adult, we don't come across blind children. We're separate for some reason, and she changed my life. She changed how I perceive my art. It's like, "What would Etta want?" If she came to a gallery, how could she perceive the art? So, I create art as if I was Etta, if I was like a five-year-old kid again, going to experience art. So, she really did change how I am on this artistic journey.

Joeita Gupta:
That's really fantastic, and we don't really think a lot about small children, especially kids with disabilities. You mentioned that a lot of schools go through your exhibits and really sort of take in the art. What kind of reception have you had from young people? Because I often feel that when we work with young people, it's such a golden opportunity to change attitudes about people with disabilities, but having people experience an exhibit like yours when someone is five, six, seven years old can change not just their perception of blindness, but can change their outlook on the world quite possibly.

Clarke Reynolds:
It's true, so I go to schools a lot and I teach braille and I teach art, and obviously, we're in this environment now where it's all coding, it's all computers, and braille is a code, so they get it. And then when you give them colour, they understand it, and then secretly they're learning math as well because it's a mathematical language. So, you get all those layers in, but the best thing is kids ask questions that adults are afraid to ask. What is sight loss? How can I see? How do I do this? So, the idea is to break down the stigma attached to sight loss. So going into schools, getting the kids to ask those questions, and then 20 years down the line, they know how to react and think of us differently.
Blindness is normal, that's the idea. Blindness is normal. I'm just like anybody else, just that I have a white cane and that's what I want society to make us feel. It's important that those children understand what blindness is, so they can just... When they see someone down the street, if they find someone's in trouble, they know how to react, and this year so far, I've engaged with over 3,000 children.

Joeita Gupta:
Hey, listen, I've only got about 30 seconds left here to talk to you, but Clarke, I've got to ask you, are you planning another trip to Canada anytime soon, preferably exhibiting some of your artwork? Because we have a lot of great gallery space in Toronto and in Vancouver as a matter of fact and all across the country, so any plans in the work to come to Canada and exhibit some of your work?

Clarke Reynolds:
I want to rule the world in braille. I would love to have a major exhibition in Toronto and Vancouver. Like I said, it's one of the most friendliest places in the world, Canada. I remember when I was 21 just walking down the streets and on my own, I went into Canada on my own and I felt as safe as brick houses. So, my aim is to be as big as those artists I've mentioned before, to change how we see blindness in the creative industry. So, if anyone is listening and they want to... I want to create a piece that's got 100,000 dots.

Joeita Gupta:
How long will that take you?

Clarke Reynolds:
That would probably take me a couple weeks. I've got the story, I'm there with the dots. As long as I've got my chocolate biscuit and my audiobook, I'll be fine.

Joeita Gupta:
Hey, that sounds great. Clarke Reynolds, thank you so much for chatting with me today. It was a pleasure.

Clarke Reynolds:
It's been great. Thank you so much.

Joeita Gupta:
Clarke Reynolds is the blind braille artist. His website, seeingwithoutseeing.com has information about upcoming exhibits. Of course, if you live in the UK you can go and check those out there, but we hope he can come to Canada and we can get to see and feel and experience some of Clarke's amazing work. This was such a great conversation and I'm sad to have to wrap it up, but we are unfortunately out of time. If you'd like to leave us some feedback, you can give us a call at 1-866-509-4545. That's 1-866-509-4545. Don't forget to leave permission to play the voicemail on the program. You can also send us an email, write to feedback at ami.ca. You can also find us on Twitter at AAMI Audio, use the hashtag Pulse AMI. If you'd like to look me up on Twitter, I am still there at Joeita Gupta. My videographer today has been Ted Cooper. Ryan Delehanty is the coordinator for AMI Podcasts. Marc Aflalo is our technical producer and Andy Frank is the manager for AMI-audio. I've been your host Joeita Gupta. Thanks for listening.