Helen Keller International Award
Until February 12; Collins Gallery, Glasgow

Artists love exploring “new ways of seeing”. They want to make you look differently at the world, by using, for example, an everyday biro instead of indian ink, or by painting directly onto a wall instead of making a framed picture. We, the gallery-going public, shuffle in and have a look, decide whether it’s changed our world view, and shuffle off again.

The thing is, our world view is narrower than we think. I wasn’t aware how narrow mine was until I went to the Helen Keller International Award exhibition in Glasgow. Two hundred entries from around the world deal with the subject of deafblindness, and the room is jam-packed with sensuousness. Smell and taste occur here and there, but the big difference is touch. Feathers, wires, buttons, chunky paint, wax, silk, clay, paper, wood, thread, food, stone: it’s all there to run your fingers over.

As a seasoned gallery-goer, locked into habit, I resisted the temptation to reach out and touch. But finally, Ruth Hay’s free-standing fold of fabric, encased in smoothly dribbled wax and chocolate, was too much for me to bare. The fragrance somehow penetrated my cold-ridden sinuses, and having checked that the invigilator was looking the other way, I furtively stroked its rippling surface.

Foolishly, it didn’t dawn on me that I was meant to be touching the exhibits. It’s how deafblind people experience life. Everything is learned and communicated through their hands, including signed conversations, braille, and finding their way around. The braille plaque at the burial place of deafblind hero, Helen Keller, has been touched by so many hands that it’s had to be replaced twice.

Hands are everywhere in this exhibition. If they’re not implied by an invitation to reach out and touch, they are featured prominently as the subject matter. Several artists go further still, making portraits not of faces but of hands. Satifa F Ummu’s shortlisted watercolour, My Hand, puts a hand in a shirt collar where we’d expect her head to be.

Lin Li’s finely worked painting, Is Anybody Out There?, depicts an image we can all identify with. A woman with her eyes shut walks through a country lane in pitch blackness. Her hands are out in front of her as she works her way through the dark. But while it evokes this experience for fully-sighted people, it also carries specific meaning for deafblind people. The position of the woman’s hands implies that one is ready to “listen” to finger signs, while the other to “speak” in the same way. Above her in the black sky are two hand signs representing the letters A and Z.

Isolation couldn’t be farther from your mind when looking at The Conversation by Grace Newman. Eight striped red and white canes – the kind used by deafblind people – emerge from the ground with eight white hands on top. Some great chatting is going on between these hands, and the only isolated individual is you, standing outside the conversation. It’s a beautifully dynamic image.

Again promoting a positive view of deafblind communication, Murray Fleming’s fabric-covered sculpture gives hands almost superhuman powers. One emits streaks of coloured wire, while the other receives the signals through a series of transparent plastic disks.

It is not explained in the captions whether each artist is deafblind or not, and indeed why should it be? However, where themes do come across strongly, it would be interesting to know whether they come straight from firsthand experience of deafblindness, or from non-deafblind artists trying to empathise.

Several artists represent the experience by throwing a veil over the human figure. I wonder whether they do this from the outside or the inside. Zsofia Berczi’s beautiful photographs depict people entirely wrapped in cloth, straining against the landscape. Tom Allan’s marble bust also has a veil rippling over the face, as if a napkin had whipped against it momentarily in a gusty street.

The Bride, a wildly scribbled pastel drawing by Heather Johnson, is an ambiguous image of a tiny face peeking out of a massive haystack of white. Ordinarily, you’d expect a bride in a puffy white dress to be a positive image, but here the figure looks so smothered in veils that she can barely make her own presence felt.

Scribbles of a different sort demonstrate the new world view which this exhibition offers. Douglas Clarkson’s 3D drawing is constructed in space, with coloured wires. Anchored to a sandy base, they curve and wind around each other like a child’s crayon meanderings. They take up real physical space in this world, while conventional drawing exists only in virtual space to a blind person.

One of the most personal works in the show is The Lost Reels. It’s a beautiful Super8 film about the artist’s father, Mervyn, who is deaf, and has recently lost his sight. Mervyn talks from start to end, but being unfamiliar with him you can’t understand what he says. He undergoes a sight test and we see what he sees – a blur of white light. Interspersed with that is an old reel of a young woman – presumably his wife – running happily on a beach.

Mervyn’s visual memories, you feel, are still strong inside him. His sight might be lost, but he can still see what’s in his head. The film is delicate and incredibly intimate. It is cheerful, poignant, and loving, and it is impossible not to be moved by it.

On a wall nearby are some poems. One, by Angela Dodds, describes colours, and the feelings we associate with them. For her, black, the colour behind closed eyes, is the only one which is unbiased and true. It is another reminder that perhaps, with too much sensory information, we can make too many assumptions about the world. Perhaps with three senses instead of five, our minds would be more open.

The winner of the Helen Keller International Award will be announced on January 31.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 16.01.05