Collaborator art

Helen’s Heart

Working alongside children who were blind profoundly expanded my perspectives around multi-sensory engagement and highlighted our culturally-visuocentric blinkers.

These children led me to perceive tactual, and indeed whole-body intelligences and to seek spaces for these ways of knowing across the educational spectrum. My artistic practices were also radically transformed.

Across this time, I began reading the diaries and letters of Helen Keller’s tutor Annie Sullivan, herself visually impaired throughout childhood, and also Helen Keller’s later recollections around the experience of losing her sight, speech and hearing from eighteen months.

When Annie entered Helen’s life there was a dramatic clash of wills followed by the release of Helen's heart, mind and spirit to soar:

'before my teacher came to me I did not know that I am, I lived in a world that was a no-world'

In this mixed-media piece, the painted, winged, clay heart contained within the wire-wool nest is intended to portray the loving, protective relationship between Helen and her family.

The remarkable insights and courage shared in Helen Keller's writings and presentations have inspired generations with regard to re-conceptualizing disability and equality revealing what Annie referred to as:

Helen's 'seeing, thinking, feeling, heart'.