Last year I completed a DLaB Erasmus course called Technology Outdoors, which aimed, amongst other things, to promote digital learning across the boundaries of physical spaces, across curriculum subjects and across languages and cultures, to facilitate collaborative learning across national boundaries. This year’s course is STEM to STEAM, which is adding the arts to science, technology, engineering and maths building on the technology outdoors by promoting real world exploration and creative problem solving through physical and digital making.I’ve just completed week one and explored the concept of art helping us to visualise scientific data – looking at the hidden world. On a wonderful, but time consuming wander through amazing photographic magnifications, I stumbled across the former biologist Robert Rock Belliveau, who on retiring started taking amazing magnified photos of fruit and vegetables. There’s a great article here.

Kandinsky: Impression III – Konzert (1911)

Going a stage further, another question posed in this unit was How do blind people perceive art? and linked to activities to explore this as well as the tech apps etc that are now around to aid a visually-impaired person. I explored further and found a great article on visual impairment and sight, What do blind people see, that linked interviews with photographs of the interviewees and then an artist created images inspired by them. However, what really interested me was the specific question and I found this on the BBC website bbc.com/culture with a film on Lisa Squirrel, who is visually impaired yet still has a passion for visual art.

In many ways, I have already started to gain new knowledge if not new skills through my research following this unit. I would like to stretch myself further in creating opportunities for students to have these links between the senses, connecting sounds and colours for example, and not just have the traditional emotive responses to art and by extention producing art.

As a realist who draws in great detail, I’m interested in exploring how to make my art more acceptable to those who are visually impaired. It is already in grey scale for those who can see tones, but do I need to scale up, add an oral description… hmmm

Last year, I created a colour collage, it’s here: White. This year, I chose to do another one. As it hasn’t rained for weeks and the prevailing colour is yellow, that was my choice for it. Furthermore, I added week one’s what-if-i-could-change-size and took macro photos.