Eye Feel: Visuality and Touch

Abstract

In 2009, I curated an exhibition called The Sense of Touch at the Macquarie University Art Gallery. It was a research exhibition, a way of using artworks to communicate aspects of my research that could not be so easily conveyed by words. It was also, for me, a way of fully exploring some of the meanings about touch and its relationship to meaning and being that I had been reading about in articles and books in a range of disciplines. Though I had not, at that time, read Rosalyn Driscoll’s wonderful study, By the Light of the Body: The Somatic Senses in the Visual Arts (2013a), it does sum up many of the findings I made while putting this exhibition together, and I refer to it throughout the chapter.