Curator's Tour of Beyond the Visual Exhibition

Join the curators of Beyond the Visual, Dr Aaron McPeake, Dr Clare O'Dowd and Professor Ken Wilder for an in-depth tour of Beyond the Visual with those who created it.

In 2002, McPeake had to abandon a long career in stage lighting design due to the loss of most of his eyesight and returned to arts education and practice on a full-time basis. He has exhibited extensively internationally, including a number of prestigious group exhibitions engaging themes from critical disability studies.

His PhD thesis, at Chelsea College of Arts, UAL Nibbling at Clouds – The Visual Artist Encounters Adventitious Blindness, is a holistic study of the impacts vision loss has on the visual artist. The thesis draws on the experiences of a panel of artists (who lost eyesight in later life) and includes his own experience as well as how he has developed his own practice.

Dr Clare O’Dowd is Research Curator at Henry Moore Institute, where she leads the Institute’s sculpture research programme of events, fellowships and exhibitions. She received her PhD from the University of Manchester in 2013, where she was Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Art History prior to joining the Institute in 2019.

Her research and curatorial interests focus on the histories of sculpture, particularly sculpture’s relationship to the experience of modernity and the ways in which artistic practices relate to broader issues of social change.

Professor Ken Wilder is an academic, artist and writer. He is Professor of Aesthetics at University of the Arts London.

Wilder makes site-responsive sculptural installations and architectural interventions. He has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally. He was artist-in-residence for Coram, the leading children’s charity; in 2016, he installed Skylights, a site-specific installation within the London Foundling mortuary, Bloomsbury. Wilder has been principal investigator on two AHRC funded projects investigating blindness arts.

Wilder has written extensively on the aesthetics of reception. His monograph Beholding: Situated Art and the Aesthetics of Reception was published in 2020 by Bloomsbury. As well as contributing chapters to edited volumes, he has had articles published in the British Journal of Aesthetics, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Aesthetics Investigations, Moving Image Review & Art Journal, Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics, Architecture and Culture, Theatre and Performance Design, Image [&] Narrative.

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