IF YOU’VE SEEN IT YOU HAVEN’T SEEN IT is a photography and poetry project developed through the Edwin Morgan Trust and Disability Arts Online Associate Artist programme.
The final exhibition will be held at AGITATE gallery in Edinburgh, from the 17th – 31st of May. Click here for more information about the gallery, and details of the free launch event.
An audio guide leads its listener through a series of images. A character in itself – the guide takes on the role of an unreliable narrator with a shifting tone: at times direct, at points abstractly poetic, and sometimes reflective. These inconsistencies and fluctuations in approach conjure up questions around the ways in which our eyes and our minds often sit at odds with each other – does the audio match up with what our own vision makes of the photographs? How many ways can an image be read? Is seeing really believing or is the old adage flawed?
The work uses as its starting point inspiration taken from Morgan’s instamatic style – the technique of writing poetry about images, both real and imagined – and combines this with ruminations on the art of photography from a visually impaired perspective, cultural understandings of sight, and the lived experience of the failings of unhelpful image description. Together, the images and text pose the question: what does ‘seeing’ really mean?
Part of the process of the associateship has involved writing blogs for Disability Arts Online – read or listen to The Bigger Picture here