Susan Humble, Artlink’s Audience Development Officer has recently been collaborating with individuals with sensory impairments and artists to explore the creative potential of access tools such as audio description or captioning.

The Word Games started to explore captioning with individuals with hearing loss. Rather than thinking about captions at the end of a production – something added on, the idea is to turn this around and use text throughout a collaborative process. Artist Anthony Schrag led workshops which encouraged people to play with text and work closely together.  This started with card games building up to finger poems and finally large scale body poems with everyone working together. One of the participants told us: “We had fun surely – but more than that, we enjoyed interacting with the words, with each other and our confidence grew. I think our brains were freed up from struggling with the communication so we could relax into the buzz of creativity….. We could be silly without feeling stupid. Liberating stuff!”

The Word Games workshops are part of Investigate | Create, a three year project supported by the Robertson Trusts, Creative Scotland and other funders to explore the creative potential of functional access tools through collaboration between artists and audiences. For more information about this work please visit the Investigate | Create blog or contact Susan Humble susan@artlinkedinburgh.co.uk