This is Hannah Wallis’s bio.
After completing a curatorial residency at Wysing Arts Centre as part of Future Curators Network; a programme supporting the career development of D/deaf and Disabled Curators, in partnership with DASH, Hannah now works full time within the Wysing team. Committed to the long-term application of accessibility practices within the arts and working rights of artists, Hannah has worked with Aural Diversity, Deafroots, The National Gallery, London, DASH and ZU-UK; and serves as associate board member for a-n Artists Information Company as well as trustee for Two Queens Gallery, Leicester. Having previously worked as part of the exhibitions team at Nottingham Contemporary, Hannah currently works in an associate capacity to lead on Caption-Conscious Ecology. Hannah is also one half of Dyad Creative, a Franco-British collaboration previously supported by a-n, East Street Arts, National Centre for Writing, Kettle’s Yard, and Arts Council England to lead and develop several temporary artist-led spaces and multiple public art projects.
Her bio shares information about her passions it seems in acessability. It also states in her bio that she finished a residency with the future curators’ network, a program supporting deaf/disabled curators.
I’m interested to see what her views are as a curator and how can we make art and spaces as accessible as possible.
Dr Annie Goh also sent us an email dictating the access requirements that Hannah needs for our visiting practitioner element. Where Hannah explains that she is deaf and requires a few sets of things to help her with the acessability of communication in this online environment. I find it interesting to understand perhaps if she wishes to, her feelings towards sound arts as a medium coming from the perspective of someone who is deaf. How does engaging with sound to hear operate?
The Art of Captioning
Hannah is currently working on a research project into acessability for art centres across England. Since covid 19 many galleries and museums have had to shift and learn how to present their work online for others to consume and enjoy. Many have had to caption and include ways for the deaf and blind/disabled to enjoy these works just as much as others. This research project is into captioning work and how to do it best for each specific situation. To create a broad example of situations to present galleries and museums how to make their work more accessible for others.
I think this is a really important part of art and society in general. I do find in most aspects I am privileged and do forget sometimes about acessability issues with my work. I never write captions or include subtitles. Perhaps I should think about this, for both the sake of myself and the consumer.
Hannah also runs a company with her peer Théodora Lecrinier called Dyad Creative. This company is mainly focused on managing places and artists’ work and allowing artists the opportunity to present their works in new spaces. It seems like Hannah is mainly focused on curation than personally presenting her own work.
Post Lecture Reflection
Hannah begins by explaining her background, she did a degree in fine art and an MA in performance art. And since completing her MA she has been thinking about how we bring people into spaces.
She also mentions that she felt anxious and nervous about speaking on a sound art degree lecture as a visiting practitioner. She’s been deaf since she was 18 months old. And because of this since she was young she’s worn a cochlear implant.
She slowly lost her hearing in her twenties and found herself becoming full deaf once she got into her late twenties. When she lost the best of her hearing she underwent an operation to receive a cochlear implant. And it gave her access to sound she’s never heard before.
This access to the cochlear implant gave her a newfound experience with sound and changed her view of how we exist with sounds in our environments. How sound helps us relate to other people and habits.
One of the first projects Hannah show us wasn’t necessarily working with sonics but to her, this was the first project she was able to work with space. That didn’t just rely on one sense of the human body.
She begins to show a video with a hip hop beat and shows specific works in an environment. This wasn’t a specific sound exhibition.
This led her to start to think about how to present sounds in different ways in her curation. So the next project that has brought her to do this was a project she did with Ain Bailey Version. She was selected to take on the curation of this. It was about broadcasting as a communication tool, and she discovered Ain Bailey and began speaking about her work.
She then showed a video of Ain Bailey explaining her work.
Ain explains this was a love letter to her Jamaican heritage, There were three parts of this exhibition. She created and recorded herself making saltfish and used the sounds into a composition to play in the gallery space. Martha todd created the ackee sculptures and she originally wanted to fill the gallery with the ache plant but instead, she got someone to create sculptures of them.
Another element of her installation in a gallery space was to play linstead Markey a famous folk song she heard as a child in the entrance of the gallery.
Finally, in the small space in the garden of the gallery, it was a love letter to dub. She received some bass lines from Mathew Ritson, and she created her own dub song. Hannah mentions the main point of the exhibition was to give Ain space to speak about her sonic history in this space. And Ain had already been thinking about this already.
She goes on to speak about captioning, it’s to capture audio content into text onto the screen. This is something she says will be used more and more once we understand how to use captioning as a tool. Artists are now considering to do this to their sound work. This project for her was a real turning point for her practice as a curator.
She thinks and believes we need to change the way we approach accessibility and this needs to be integrated into daily practice and not seen as an add on and something that comes at the end of a project when you don’t have much budget or resources left. That’s what became the core of her work now. She now believes that sound is something that can be moved into the realm of those who are hard of hearing or deaf to experience this work.
Her idea is, how do we caption work that currently exists? How do we approach the accessibility of those works? How do we do that sensibly ? The people that enter these spaces may not enter on equal terms. How do we invest this in artwork, live work? Music nights, live events. performances, sound work? How do we experiment and play with these really useful tools? Which will add to the work not take any from it.
How do we visualise sounds, there is a lot of words that are connected to sonic understanding that might not be in a dictionary of someone that isn’t fully immersed in a sound world. How do we move beyond certain words that might not mean something to someone who is deaf? How do people understand these terms?
She explains it similar to being blind, and if you’ve always been blind how can you understand colours? She explains it’s the same with deafness there are certain terms that make it difficult to engage or understand the caption.
The physicality of sound she explains does go beyond listening, it can be experienced through touch and vibration, different translations of sound. The word translation is the word that comes up, time and time again as she develops this work. And so she’s going to end it there and bring It back to the concept of care. For her to work with sound is to take care of it in a different way and find ways of sharing sound with people that haven’t experienced it in different ways.
I found Hannah’s lecture to be captivating and informative without portraying a negative light to her issues. I do find perhaps sometimes Politically correct topics can make me feel overwhelmed as I usually do agree with what’s being said. But I find the way of resolving these issues to be immensely difficult and require a rebuilt attitude amongst our society. I did find her views on captioning work to completely make sense, I agree thoroughly with what she stands for. And I definitely will attempt to make my work more accessible to more people in the future. It was also interesting to see her perspective on sound arts from a deaf person that experiences sound differently than we do.