The students and staff from the vision impairment Resourced Provision were determined to visit a ground breaking exhibition at the Henry Moore institute in Leeds. This is a famous venue where exhibitions focus on sculpture. We visited the Beyond the Visual exhibition. What was unique about the experience was that all the exhibits were created to be accessible  to be explored by touch, smell and sound. What’s more the majority of the exhibits had been created by vision impaired artists. One of the artists arrived  during our visit, flying in from his home in Canada. He explained that he had lost his vision progressively as a young person. He remembers enjoying firework displays in his home city, so he decided to create sculptures on glass back lit by bright coloured light to represent fireworks as the burst in a night sky. Before we left the gallery we were able to explore by touch an original Henry Moore sculpture called Mother and Child. 

The second part of the visit was a creative sculpture workshop. The idea of the workshop was to create a vertical sculpture using a range of unusual tactile objects and materials, which could be strung and stacked together to create unique totem poles. All in all it was an unusual and entertaining experience. which opened up so many possibilities for creativity and participation in the arts.