Tactile Descriptions: A New Accessibility Tool in the Art Setting

This article focuses on the last stage of a broad action project about access, touch, and sculpture. In this project, inspired by similar tactile practices carried out by dÉvie and Kleege (2018) and Kleege (2021; 2023), blind participants were invited to implement diverse sensing patterns and exploratory procedures in four art pieces while they verbalized how they touched the sculptures and what they felt. This objective involved four stages: offering participants particular tactile recommendations previously prepared for each of the pieces; observing how the participants implemented these recommendations and how they implemented and verbalized their own techniques to the haptic exploration; obtaining their feedback on the overall experience; and creating tactile descriptions of those four art pieces for future individual sculptural practices in the museum when in-person touch tours are not offered. The final stage of the project was the result of the three previous stages and is the focus of the present article.