[accessibleimage] garden, art, pottery, photography, seeing machine

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Subjects: garden, color-blind artist, art exhibit, seeing machine, pottery, blind photographer exhibit at Kennedy Center
http://www.leedstoday.net/ViewArticle2.aspx?SectionID=39&ArticleID=1571815

Garden for the blind wins gold medal for designer Tracy
By Hannah Postles
GARDEN designer Tracy Foster from Leeds has won a gold medal at the Gardeners' World show in Birmingham for her revolutionary £3,000 seaside garden for the blind.
Tracy, of Gledhow Wood Grove, teamed up with the National Talking Newspapers and Magazines – a charity who record publications for the blind – to design the 'Sea Hear' garden, which won top prize in the small gardens category at the National Exhibition Centre show.
The professional gardener, who has a degree in Plant Biology and a diploma from the Institute of Garden Design, wanted to raise awareness for the charity and to show that people with restricted or no sight can get just as much enjoyment from a garden as anyone else.
"When I first started thinking about the show I was going to explore the theme of relaxation, so when the National Talking Newspapers and Magazines got involved I took things from there," she said.
"It has been a challenge but I wanted to create the relaxed feeling you get when you are on holiday on a beach, and at the same time, recreate the sounds, textures, the scents and even the taste that you get in a seaside garden."
The small garden, which is enclosed on two sides by sandcastle-like wall, is fronted by a shingle beach of shells, pebbles and driftwood that crunches undefoot. Aromatic herbs and seaside-smelling plants, including one which gives an oyster-like taste, were hand-picked and prepared by Tracy.
The garden enthusiast, who has worked professionally for four years, was helped by Leeds-based company Garden Concept and local artist Julie Pope.
17 June 2006



article abstract
http://www.venturacountystar.com/vcs/county_courses/article/0,1375,VCS_2316_4784134,00.html
Sardisco taught art for nearly 40 years but first and foremost considered himself an artist. He made a name for himself with his strong sense of color, an irony for a man who was color blind.

Gallery showcases all artistic types
http://news.cincypost.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060619/NEWS01/606190345

Gallery showcases all artistic types

By Peggy Kreimer
Post staff reporter

From across the room, the painting looks like a baby playing in a bucket, but up close, the baby is asleep in a war helmet filled with oil.

It's an artist's statement on war and peace, and the artist wouldn't have had the confidence to show it if macular degeneration wasn't stealing his sight.

"I have a disability, and I was very insecure about my work," said Wayne Hambrick of Evanston.

When Jackie Baumgartner, who runs the Art Beyond Boundaries gallery in Cincinnati, first asked Hambrick to consider showing his work, he told her "No."

"She told me the gallery is for artists who have disabilities," said Hambrick. "I thought, I won't be alone."

The gallery opened in December, and the latest display shows just how not alone Hambrick is.

He originally felt more comfortable knowing fellow artists also were dealing with physical, mental or medical disabilities. The latest show, called "Changing Perceptions," combines work of artists with and without disabilities.

Nothing in the show tells viewers which is which.

The gallery is a project of the 29-year-old Center for Independent Living Options, which works to break down barriers of attitude and architecture that prevent people with disabilities from being fully included in the community.

The latest gallery show is an example of that that mission, said center director Lin Laing.

The art stands on its own, even if some of its artists don't. Some artists use wheelchairs. Some need crutches. Several have various degrees of blindness. Some have medical conditions that get in the way of full employment. In many cases, those conditions just serve to enhance the power of the paintings, sculpture, quilts, mixed-media mosaics and pen-and-ink drawings.

Gallery volunteer Robert Wallace led an impromptu tour of the show this week.

A large glazed pottery basket, with glass-like clay slabs creating a naturalistic landscape dominates a display shelf.

"That artist is totally blind," said Wallace. "The shape, the texture is everything."

A spare pen-and-ink portrait brings the ample form of a man to life. It doesn't matter if the artist was sitting in a wheelchair or on a stool when he sketched it.

Wallace's own work is on the walls. An oil and acrylic nightscape called Mondnacht (midnight) has a dark, ambiguous feel, with a yellow moon that seems even brighter when Wallace reveals the color is augmented with a touch of mustard. Suddenly, the painting is not as dark as it seems - much like life, said Wallace.

A disabling illness knocked him out of the job market several years ago, but his art, which had been a private pleasure, has given new purpose to his life, he says. The gallery, both exhibiting and volunteering, has been truly a lifesaver.

He created a mosaic from bits of broken glass and castaway trash collected from the riverbank and titled it "Fragments."

"You can take what no one wanted and make something beautiful," he said.

Covington artist Carolyn Anne Reed-Hanks has been treated for an emotional disability and relished the chance to participate in a show of artists with and without disabilities.

"I have been with and without disabilities over and over my long life," she said with a laugh. Her watercolors and collages are whimsical and vibrant studies of everyday objects - oil cans, peppers, and glass bottles.

Betty Nola of Covington had polio as a child and took up watercolor initially because the equipment was easier to carry than oils and solvents.

She's exhibited her landscapes and seascapes in galleries in Virginia. An Art Beyond Boundaries show was her first gallery showing since moving to Kentucky 18 months ago. She's not in the current show, but expects to be in the next show in August.

Most shows in the gallery season will be reserved for artists with disabilities, but the open show may become an annual eye opener, Laing said.

Laing stresses that Art Beyond Boundaries is an art gallery.

"The people who show are established," she said. "They may not have shown their work before, but they're not students, they're not people who just started painting. ... This show gives them an opportunity to exhibit and market their art alongside fellow artists who are not disabled, and it gives the public a totally different view. It makes them stop and think."


excerpts article
http://www.livescience.com/humanbiology/060523_vision_restored.html

"With her good eye, Elizabeth Goldring can distinguish between light and dark and see hand movement, but not individual fingers. She cannot recognize faces or read.

Goldring is an artist, a poet, and a senior fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for Advanced Visual Studies. Her vision loss doesn't make any of these activities easier. She started losing her vision about 20 years ago. Today, after several surgeries, she has limited vision in her right eye, but is blind in the left.

Now Goldring and a team of eye doctors, fellow researchers, and students have produced a "seeing machine <http://www.livescience.com/php/multimedia/imagedisplay/img_display.php?pic=060523_vision_machine_02.jpg%E2%88%A9=Elizabeth+Goldring,+foreground,+looks+into+%27seeing+machine%27+to+take+a+virtual+tour+of+a+gallery+using+a+joystick.+Her+assistant,+Jackie+McConnell,+is+at+right.+Credit%3A+Donna+Coveney>" that allows the visually challenged to view the face of a friend, access the Internet, and "previsit" unfamiliar buildings"

"Although still in the early stages of development, there is potential the machine could deliver real-time images to its user. Goldring has already successfully experimented with hooking it up to a video camera. But packing the whole contraption into a wearable, portable device could be especially difficult."

"After miniaturizing the SLO and developing her own "visual language"—consisting of short words that incorporate graphics and symbols to convey meaning and make the image easier to see and read—the next step was to offer the experience to others who could benefit."

article

http://www.bransondailynews.com/story_print.php?storyID=1272
Wedekind is an anomaly in the world of professional potters.

Not because his bowls, pots and vases display the meticulous perfection of a professional, combined with an artist’s eye for beauty; and not because he works the potter’s wheel like a master.

No, Wedekind is unique in the field of pottery because he is blind — and he has no hands.

At the Welcome Home 2006 vendor village at Mansion America, Wedekind works his potter’s wheel, forming what will become a bowl.

He stops to sign a vase that a pair of tourists have purchased. He takes a short break behind the tent and smokes his pipe.

And he does it all with a swift, confident familiarity.

Wedekind, 57, is himself a veteran who suffered a devastating injury as a 19-year-old Marine in Vietnam.

He was lucky to be alive, but the injury cost him his hands and eyes — as well as causing serious injuries to his head and left leg. He said he got into pottery at the urging of his grandmother, who was a ceramist.

“I told her, ‘Are you crazy, I can’t even dress myself,’” he said.

However, the seed was planted. He also said there was little else he could do at the time.

“When I came home four months after my injury, the VA just couldn’t come up with anything for me,” he said. “I couldn’t do the things blind men usually do; and I couldn’t do the things amputees usually can do. If I’d had this injury in Korea, I wouldn’t have survived, so I was a new thing for them.”

Wedekind began taking classes at Kansas State University in his home town of Manhattan, Kan.

In 1969, he had surgery, known as the Krukenburg amputation procedure, to separate the two bones in his left arm, which allowed him to grasp objects.

It worked well enough for him that he had the same procedure performed on the other arm in 1973.

He said opening his forearm requires the same muscles as lifting his thumb.

“It took me a while to learn, because nobody knew,” he said.

He said the procedure was necessary for him, and has been performed on other blind amputees, because a person needs to be able see in order to use prosthetics.

“With two prosthetics, you can’t feel anything,” he said. “I’d be breaking things; I’d hurt people.”

Wedekind spent four months in Vietnam. He said he doesn’t mind talking about the injury that so altered his life, but that there’s not much to talk about. He said he doesn’t know exactly what happened.

“I don’t want to know,” he said. “The Marines believe I encountered a booby trap, but that’s speculation.”

Wedekind lives in Westmoreland, Kan,. a suburb of Manhattan, Kan., along with his wife, Diana, of 17 years. Diana, also an artist, collaborates with her husband on painting and glazing all his pottery. They have seven children and seven grandchildren.

Wedekind said this is not his first trip to Branson.

“I came here in 1972 to Silver Dollar City,” he said. “It’s changed.”


article
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2006/5/prweb389780.htm

Local Artists Win International Competition, Will Transform the Kennedy Center

/Kurt Weston, Clovis Blackwell to exhibit at John F. Kennedy Center, Washington D.C./

Sacramento (PRWEB) May 25, 2006 -- In another flourish of ongoing progress, Alice Parente executive director of Very Special Arts California, is pleased to announce board member, artist Kurt Weston, Huntington Beach, and artist Clovis Blackwell, Thousand Oaks, as winners of the international contest “Transformations”. The jury, made of top tier art experts from around the nation, selected Weston and Blackwell from a pool of over 300 international artists. Winners will exhibit their work at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Arts, Washington D.C. from June 5-29th. As a further honor, Weston’s work was selected as the artwork for the exhibit’s publicity pieces. Weston, Blackwell and Parente will travel to Washington D.C. next week to attend a VIP reception and view the exhibition.

VSA arts national organization initiated its competition to communicate the influence of change, education, perception and disability. The competition helps VSA arts to “better communicate our story” said Parente “our artists communicate their passion, and in doing so they invite visitors to consider the transformations in their lives, and how art transforms”.

The distinguished jury panel included: Amy Horschak, educator in the Department of Education at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; Stacey Schmidt, independent curator, most recently the associate curator of contemporary art at the Corcoran Gallery of Art; Ramon Terleckyj, vice president for artistic planning at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts; and Jeannine Chartier, executive director of VSA arts of Rhode Island and artist.

With over 15 years as a legally blind photographer Weston, who uses traditional photographic techniques to produce powerfully moving and thought provoking images, proved the ideal artist to promote the exhibit. “I am truly passionate about my art and advocacy”, enthuses Weston, “this exhibit will raise the profile of VSA arts and has the potential to change visitor’s pre-conceived notions of blindness. This is exactly what I am about”. Weston has achieved great results through his work, and his advocacy for the visually impaired community. In September 2005 he coordinated and curated Shared Visions at the southern California College of Optometry. His work has also been featured at the Berkley Art Museum and San Francisco City Hall.

For more information on the exhibit and national tour, visit www.vsacalifornia.org <http://www.vsacalifornia.org>
VSA arts is an international nonprofit organization founded in 1974 by Ambassador Jean Kennedy Smith to create a society where all people with and without disabilities learn through, participate in, and enjoy the arts. VSA arts provides educators, parents, and artists with resources and the tools to support arts programming in schools and communities. VSA arts showcases the accomplishments of artists with disabilities and promotes increased access to the arts for people with disabilities. Each year millions of people participate in arts programs through a nationwide network of affiliates and in more than 60 countries around the world. VSA arts is an affiliate of the John F. Kennedy Center for the performing arts.





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