Arts Activated Transcript: Bay 17 - 20th September 2016

Access Services and Audience Development

ALEX JONES:

Good afternoon, everybody. I know it looks like we have a small group here, we do have three concurrent sessions happening. Thank you for choosing us and joining us. Quite an intimate afternoon.

My name is Alex Jones. This session I am quite excited about and it is a passion of mine because I enjoy seeing different artists and different artworks and I appreciate access to arts. This session we are focusing on service aspects and how you establish that for an audience.

To establish access you need to have an audience, you need to have the input. And how we are to develop from audience experience to create a great accessible experience.

It is like a cycle almost. We have five amazing presenters here this afternoon. They will share their experience about how they develop access.

And access in relation to art, they will talk about their gallery experience and so forth. We have Heather Marsh. Heather is an Industry Development Manager at Arts Access Victoria. We have Luke King, who is an artist.

We have Pauline McCreath, who is a Visitor Services Coordinator at the National Portrait Gallery. And we have Imogen Yang, Director of Insightful. And then we have Danielle Gulotta, who is Access Programs Producer at the Art Gallery of NSW.

The first presentation is called No Translation Required and the first presenters will be Heather Marsh and Luke King. First Heather will tell us about her experience and

what her work is and how to work with many organisations within the cultural stage to focus on how you are able to create cross partnerships, working together to create access.

After we hear from Heather, we will hear from Luke. Luke has a bachelor of arts, holding Honours in that degree. He works with deaf students in deaf schools. I would like to welcome Heather and Luke. This is specifically to do with their work on Andy Warhol - Ai Weiwei with the National Gallery of Victoria.

HEATHER MARSH:

Thanks, Alex. I am on the clock, it is lovely to see you here today. You are spread out so I will try to give you all my focus.

My name is Heather Marsh, I'm the Industry Development Manager at Arts Access Victoria, I am presenting with Luke King. We've been planning recently and came up with the statement – the goal of the industry development team is for all Victorian arts organisations to be actively inclusive and universally accessible forever.

The 'forever' bit is crucial. If our work only transforms each organisation in one area of access, the two or three theatre seasons or one year of exhibitions, we have failed.

The transformation must become something actively sought by the arts organisations themselves and that is where partnerships are important.

One aspect of my career is creating and brokering partnerships. The word partnership gets bandied around a lot, and it can mean anything from something transactional like a sponsorship, to something like a complimentary sharing of goods and services which I will call a tailored partnership – this means you do this bit and we'll do that bit.

Right through to the partnership with transparent processes and an equal commitment to time and processes. This is a central concept which we are interrogating for ourselves. What do we offer and what is its value? To whom do we make that offer and what is reciprocated?

We know we can't continue to meet the exponentially growing demand on our organisation for services, advice and confirmation to the whole sector for free or some kind of reciprocity of commitment.

What could we achieve if we partnered so arts organisations took on the responsibility of seeding learning, advocacy, models and solutions and seeding that out to the other galleries, theatres, dance companies or festivals?

In short, what if the cultural sector were leading inclusion, not us? This is what we are starting to see. I want to talk to you about a pilot project which is starting to blossom.

It is the beginning of a partnering conversation between Arts Access Victoria and the National Gallery of Victoria, about how we can each achieve our core purpose by working together.

NGV recognised in late 2014 that their offer of Auslan interpreted tours were not getting take-up from the deaf community. They were seeking to provide access and engage the audience and wanted to explore why the offer was not being taken up.

They approached Arts Access Victoria and consulted with the Deaf Arts Network. Through an open and explorative conversation NGV partnered with Arts Access Victoria for a pilot program of tours, not interpreted from English to Auslan but delivered by Deaf guides, who were artists.

This was not revolutionary. Tate Modern and the Whitney have done this for some time. What was important was opening up the channel, a sense of ownership. The first two major exhibitions of Warhol - Weiwei were massively oversubscribed and a third was added.

A second series of tours to the Australian Fashion Show, delivered by artists, were also booked out. And now the workshops through the NGV's education programs would have been taken up by deaf schools in Victoria.

Initially five deafblind Victorians attended the tours, bringing their own interpreters with them.

We are opening up huge potential for creation and creative engagement in so many areas, not just audience development but exhibition design, events, exhibition programming and employment for deaf artists and other artists with disability.

Program raises NGV's reputation and leads the way for other Victorian galleries. The most exciting aspect of an initiative like this for the artists involved, for NGV staff and arts access Victoria, is where to from here?

The National Gallery of Victoria wants to continue the tour is, which I think is fantastic. Arts access Victoria is considering whether to invest our resources with partners who can deliver significant leadership and raise the bar of access and inclusion and engage deeply with them.

And we want them to bring the rest of their artform sector on the journey with them.

We don't know what the next step will be because every partnership is an evolving conversation. We do know that we have success to build on and deaf artists will be a strong voice in leading the way for the next part of our partnership journey.

With that I am happy to hand over to our lead artist on the program, Luke King.

(Applause)

LUKE KING:

Thank you, Alex. Good afternoon, and thank you to Heather. Thank you for having me here this afternoon. I am excited to be sharing this opportunity with everybody.

Two people once said to me to share a story and share experience and a narrative is an important part of my life so I will share that with you.

I originally grew up in Wollongong. And I have lived in Melbourne for the last 10 years. I am third-generation deaf. And I come from a strong blue-collar family, who from the outside it would appear we know nothing about the arts.

Often we would visit museums, art galleries, go to the Powerhouse Museum, for example. In 1989 it was a significant moment for me. The Gold of the Pharaoh was an exhibition we went to. I arrived in the showrooms and thought this was a fundamental moment in my life.

My family always encouraged my love of arts and I had a particular interest in drawing. I decided to study arts at TAFE and to focus on more than one thing.

Everything in art is visual and I have this visual connection and my language is visual so I had a connection. The issue I struggled with was the written language, the English language. English is my second language. I didn't give up, I had a passion and I went with my drive to learn art.

The first Auslan-interpreted gallery tour I went on was in Wollongong and I thought this was very interesting. I was very curious about it.

Not long after, the Art Gallery of NSW, probably about 16 years ago, Margaret Preston exhibition, it was a small number of people who went along but the impact was quite profound.

Screenshot to Melbourne, I lost interest in art, I was travelling and I was in Italy, in Pisa. I went to the leaning Tower of Pisa which I found a beautiful building, a church, and the tower of Pisa. I went to the top and I was about to leave the building and something caught my eye.

A group of older people standing in a semicircle. There was a man signing and I thought – this is interesting. I positioned myself, being a curious tourist, and watched. The man who was signing, his body language was natural and I was so intrigued and interested by the information. The language was rich and I was intrigued.

The presenter stopped and moved his back to me a little bit, thinking I was just a curious tourist. He finished the presentation, the man looked at me with this face – what are you doing here?

I explained I was an Australian tourist, I was deaf. We became friends. He was an American man, communicating in ASL, doing tours for tourists coming to Italy.

I held onto that thought until I had an opportunity to do it today.

I was back in Melbourne, I had a wonderful opportunity, studying at VCA. I finished my honours last year with a major in printmaking and drawing. VCA gave me a wonderful opportunity to not just focus on the technique of art, but also at theory, art history, and how to problem solve and come across and solve problems. My language development came across with me, I feel I am much more educated because of it.

The Warhol - Weiwei exhibition we were just talking about, I was working with Connexu, with Phil Harper, we had a video we decided we would work together on.

Gina and Marion along with Medina worked together to create a video that would be the Auslan to for this show. I saw the opportunity, grabbed it with both hands, said, "I have to be a part of this."

Gina and Marion were very supportive throughout the whole process, I can't thank them enough.

My experience as a deaf to a guide, especially for the Warhol - Weiwei exhibition, it was a great experience, I was able to assess their body language, answer questions, I did not just speak, it was interactive. I spoke with everyone, answered questions, it was really interactive.

The art narrative is something people can be really unaware. It is not for me, but to make it accessible, they feel like it is a personal limitation, they come along, they learn, maybe it becomes part of an event they go to once per month.

So the language I use, Auslan, it is free-form. I am able to fit it to many people, whether they be deafblind, have low vision, hard of hearing, they might be deafblind with a hearing partner, they might be students learning to sign. I feel I am able to match it to their language and their understanding of Auslan.

The last tour we had was over 40 people, it was quite hard to facilitate, but a wonderful experience.

It is not only for adults, not only for the general public, but we are thinking about children. Children have a special vision, and are able to connect to visual things quite easily. We are looking at resources, money, it has become quite depleted as late.

I have tried to get into the theory, contemporary context, and give all this information to the kids. I can't give it to the kids, but I can give it to the adults. I need to figure out how to adjust my program to make this kid friendly.

I have looked at the program, how the materials are made, what colours they are, I bring it down to a really basic level to assess what is applicable for kids, and make it accessible for children.

The deaf community is quite spread out, we are quite vast. Whether you're in Sydney or Melbourne, what do we have next? We want to have something we can establish that is technology focused, that we are able to use Australia wide. So I have created a vlog, a video blog, you don't physically have to be there to guide the tour. It is something we can make accessible regardless of the location.

Maybe just for one or two artworks, but that is the next step.

I think it is important to access at in your native language. And I think it is an area for growth in deaf lead tours. I think it is important for the audience to have a positive experience and learn with a deaf lead tour.

I have worked with NGV on some resources going forward, I am confident we have a fruitful future together. I'm hoping other people will be able to take up the initiatives we have created.

Thank you for your time.

(Applause)

ALEX JONES:

Thank you, Luke, thank you, Heather. He talked about culturally deaf people, we have our own culture we are channelling, we are able to respond and the interactive in the way that we sign.

It is not trying to be exclusive in any way, we are trying to find that engagement. He raised that point, how important it is to have a deaf person giving that experience to other deaf people.

Thank you for sharing that today.

Next we are talking about the National Portrait Gallery, and we have two presenters, Pauline and Imogen.

When Paths Converge, which is about audio description, is what they are presenting today. Pauline's work to date is 15 years at the gallery, she is now the Coordinator for Visitor Services, including education and cultural history. She is very interested in learning about accessibility and making sure her gallery is accessible to all people. Working with people with Alzheimer's at the NPG.

She is also working with Imogen Yang, an audio describer. They have many projects to work out how they might make the artwork accessible to anybody who comes into the gallery.

I'm very excited to hear what they have to say today, I'll ask them to come up to the lectern, Pauline and Imogen.

(Applause)

PAULINE McCREATH:

The National Portrait Gallery showcases aspects of our culture and identity, for those who are Australian by birth, by association, and those who have made a contribution in their particular field of endeavour.

The purpose of portraiture includes communicating ideas of history, memory and biography. This may also include to honour, recognise and remember a person, to record, represent or document a person, to explore particular aspects of identity, to

explore aspects of self, to document stages of a life, and to explore aspects of being human, both personal and public.

We will quickly flash through a few portraits you might recognise. If anybody would like audio description, Imogen will do it off the cuff.

OK.

IMOGEN YANG:

I will just do it if you require it.

PAULINE McCREATH:

That photo is a portrait of Barbara Blackman, in her younger years, posing for another artist.

As Alex said, I have been involved for many years in public programs, education, Visitor Services, and working with people of varying needs and abilities.

I think historically our access and learning team has responded to many requests from different community groups, and we have tailored programs for those, as Alex already mentioned.

We jumped in and did it. The access policy has always been in our corporate plan, perhaps a little bit in the background. Now we have a revised and new action plan.

It was developed in response to our commitment to employ best practice methods to ensure that the gallery site, the collection, and the programs are accessible to everyone.

We are committed to engagement with access for diverse audiences of all abilities. The vision there is to increase public access to the collection, programs and facilities, to promote inclusion, recognition and the dissipation of persons with a disability, to be part of a change in attitudes towards disability, and to comply with relevant standards and legislation.

Some of the priorities we have identified have come from visitor feedback and consultation with an access advisory group. And that Access Advisory Group just begun earlier this year, we talked about it late last year. And so some of those priorities are exhibition design and experience, online engagement, audience development and marketing strategies, programs and visitor services, staff training, and building access.

We think the unique thing about it, the advisory group, we have representatives from different organisations, parts of the community, Imogen is part of that advisory group.

This research, people participated in critical surveys earlier this year, and an ongoing conversation and dialogue with our stakeholders. That will lead us to responding in developing programs.

The audio description is just one project in development. Working with Imogen, the aims are to promote visual arts as a viable art form to be accessed by those with visual and cognitive impairments where they might previously not have had access to that.

Skills through audio description and training with Imogen, and using best practice and research methods facilitated by Imogen.

And we believe that the portrait collection we have is a rich resource. Mainly through this theme of portraits tell stories. There is an important relationship between the artist, the subject, and us as a viewer.

The artist may build this relationship by choosing to represent them in a particular way. But more and more importantly, we often know the person represented in the portrait. Maybe their place of work or recognition in the community, or representing a specific group of citizens.

This can enrich and inform the reading of the artwork.

So we bring our memories, our knowledge, of this person and their life experiences, to art. So I will just pause there and Imogen is going to continue.

IMOGEN YANG:

Hello, everyone is a privilege to be here. I think this is an important conversation were having across institutions, across different disability community.

I am an audio describer, I work with an outfit called Insightful. I have been working with the National Portrait Gallery for the last year or so and as Pauline explained, we have an audio description project in progress, meaning that the permanent collection will start to become accessible for people who are blind and partially sighted.

The National Portrait Gallery is a unique place. Portraits have a unique function and role as museum spaces. Portraits invoke a different kind of set of relationships between the viewer, the person depicted and the artist who created them.

For those reasons portraiture poses particular challenges for the audio describer. Describing a fellow human is very difficult when you need to keep firmly at the forefront of the fundamental rule of audio description, which is to retain objectivity as much as possible.

The challenge of this comes to the fore when dealing with portraiture. When we initiated our relationship with a view to starting to make the permanent collection at the NPG available, we had to think about the approach and develop new theories and methodologies.

It has been a rewarding process in that sense because it has been a genuinely creative collaboration and that has been refreshing from my point of view, as someone who works with a wide range of organisations.

Often the major institutions tend to have their own ways of doing things and while they may be willing to start to develop access programs, sometimes there is a kind of thinking that they will perhaps bring someone in for a short period to help them but ultimately it will be something they would want to take over and continue themselves.

While that is an approach that can work well, I would be strongly advocating in this context for a more collaborative long-term relationship. As Pádraig Naughton said in his keynote speech, no one is an expert in everything. A person may not understand how an organisation or gallery works on all its levels.

And people working in art galleries and museums with the best of research into disability access and inclusion, may not best understand their audiences.

What we thought we would do today in this part of our section is to invite you to participate in an audio description interactive. We wanted to share with you how our practice happened and how we started to build it.

The challenges with talking about human beings and the difficulties when you have to talk about somebody's size, shape, skin colour. We had to start from the ground up. As well as that we realised there was a richness that the public programs at the NPG would be able to bring to the audio description process.

Some of you may know that in best practice audio description you'd always have two pairs of eyes on the artwork, film or piece of theatre. Ideally it would not just be one pair of eyes and this rule has been adopted to reduce the subjectivity, to try to filter out individual biases that people bring to their viewing.

With this relationship we decided to make a second pair of eyes on every artwork be National Portrait Gallery staff. We would have a staff member bring in lots of bias, lots of subjectivity and heaps of knowledge and expertise about those artworks. And having to put that aside and work in a different way.

That has been a rewarding process for all of us. I have learned a lot from it as an audio describer and from the feedback I've had from the staff members I've worked with, it has been an interesting process for all concerned.

At this point I am going to invite you, if you will go along with me in this exercise. You saw a number of images before, I don't know if you recall them, we will pick one out and ask you to help us build an audio description by first examining what your subject is, an objective approach to an artwork.

I enjoyed the quote from Pádraig Naughton's grandmother – if you don't talk, you won't be heard. I want to remind you of the quote from James Joyce, "Shut your eyes and see."

Not literally shut your eyes. I'm going to show you an image. Again, if someone in the audience requires audio description, let me know but the purpose of this is to invite you to collaborate with us.

We are going to allow you to look at it for a short period of time, maybe six seconds, and then we will close it down again and have a discussion about it.

If we could have that next image...

OK, that's enough. Because we only have 1 min. Did anyone recognise the photograph? Is anyone familiar with it? Does somebody know what the title of the work is?

COMMENT FROM FLOOR:

(Inaudible)

IMOGEN YANG:

Great. That is a nice introductory caption. It is a photograph by a photo journalist, it shows Vincent Lingari and Gough Whitlam.

Sorry, I am just asking if someone in the audience can share something relatively objective. No background knowledge about the photograph, can they remember anything they literally saw in the photograph.

COMMENT FROM FLOOR:

The sky was clear.

IMOGEN YANG:

Anything else? Any key key factors? If you were talking on the phone to someone about the photograph, what would you say?

COMMENT FROM FLOOR:

(Inaudible)

IMOGEN YANG:

OK, so, two men, one wearing a formal blue suit, quite burly. The other one has been identified as Aboriginal. Anything else? Just call it out.

COMMENT FROM FLOOR:(Inaudible)

IMOGEN YANG:

Soil was being poured from above into the hands of the Aboriginal man. OK, anyone else? The soil was being poured by the tall man on the right. OK, I think we are nearly out of time. It gives you an idea of the variations in the things that people notice first, how you would structure and audio description, which elements are important, how do you build the solidity of that time or picture?

How do you indicate who the people are in relation to each other? How important are the surroundings? Do the surroundings tell you anything about the individuals? If you already know something about the portrait, how will you reel that in to allow the blind person to come at it cold so they can build their own interpretation?

I hope that has given you some small insight into our working practice. Thank you very much.

(Applause)

ALEX JONES:

Thank you, Imogen. We are pushed for time and we wanted to leave time for questions at the end. We have one more presenter, Danielle Gulotta, from the Art Gallery of NSW. She has been there since 2008 making sure art is accessible and facilitating the experience of people going to the Art Gallery of NSW. I would like to invite her to say a few words.

Her presentation is creating Pathways...

DANIELLE GULLOTTA:

Thank you, Alex. And thank you to Accessible Arts for the opportunity to speak today. I will rush through.

What I will do today is run through briefly some of our programs at the Art Gallery of NSW and then focus on the evolution of our Auslan programs. There are lots of

parallels between the work that is happening in Victoria and also the way And in at the National Portrait Gallery.

There is an evolution of programming in cultural institutions around Australia. Firstly, the key things for the Art Gallery of New South Wales is inclusion and participation.

The Art Gallery of NSW creates and inclusive environment through access programs designed to increase participation of a diverse audience of all ages and abilities.

Within the gallery, our access programs create a context for individuals to engage in art, ask questions, challenge ideas and express personal opinions in a social context.

We tried through access programs to create experiences and opportunities for individuals to imagine and think creatively about at in a safe environment.

One of the outcomes of programs is the stimulation of curiosity. Through curiosity, we get people thinking, speaking and sharing, and most importantly, having the open-ended outcomes for groups and individuals to formulate either their own response through speaking, writing, and most importantly, making art in response.

In our programs individuals reach their own interpretation about our through focused observation. Again, group discussion, making personal connection and incorporating an art making experience as a form of expression.

At the Art Gallery of NSW we run a range of access program that our on demand as well as scheduled and advertised on our website and through our marketing. Many of these programs, most of them now, are either artist-led or invited us to present.

We have Auslan programs and in touch audio description tours, and all of these are showcased for our major exhibitions. Community access workshops that are connecting with adults with disabilities from a range of community organisations.

Children's access workshops run through the school holiday. We have our art and dementia program as well as engaging with education audiences through our art Pathways program, connecting with students with disabilities in the classroom.

The last one is special projects. Each year we have been collaborating with a particular organisation. Last year we collaborated quite closely for three or four months with Sunnyfield Disability Services and we had a very long and engage program of bringing adults with intellectual disabilities into the gallery and having a showcase to celebrate International Day for People with Disability.

This year we are partnering with Ability Options and the Front Up program, which you may have heard.

I just want to go through some of the things we do with the gallery when we are putting together access programs. So, firstly, I think it comes, as everyone said, it comes from top up, as well as grassroots and everything in between.

Key milestones, one of the key pushes its diversity in audiences. That is coming from our board and executives. Having that as a mandate and responding to government legislation, but also audience demand, is very important.

With that, having that in your overarching institution's plan means that there are funds connected with that. Secondly, community consultation is key. Talking to peak bodies, having the support of Accessible Arts, mostly getting feedback and talking to people who have been on programs and asking what individuals have enjoyed, perhaps what they have not enjoyed, how can we improve, and what would they like to see more of?

Flexibility in design and delivery of programs is essentially key to success on the delivery of many programs.

When we advertise a program, when people book in, from our front of house staff we try to collect as much information as we can to tailor an experience for the individuals in that program.

Marketing is extremely important. For many years – I know have spoken to Sancha at Accessible Arts – having your marketing tailored to be in a mainstream space as well as targeted marketing so you can target different organisations, peak bodies, and work with critical artists as well, it is extremely important.

We are recently developing EDMs, electronic direct marketing, we are hoping to extend that and have not only our access programs in our mainstream art emails, but also more bespoke marketing campaigns.

Feedback, I'm sure all my fellow panellists would agree, is key to the continuation of all arts programs. There is no reason to run something if people are not enjoying it. That leads to audience development, which is key to grow the programs.

What I'm going to showcase today is how we have had a signing art Auslan program for almost 20 years, and through that we have seen an evolution of participants who have participated.

It... The program reached a stage that really needed to evolve. For the last 20 years we have been presenting Auslan interpreted talks, tools and events. Over 20 years, you get an audience of a certain age, they may be ageing, you may have an audience who are younger and then have had children, there is this evolution and growth.

I think it was in 2014 or 2013, Accessible Arts invited me to a deaf arts forum at the Parramatta Riverside Theatre. In that community consultation, it was gathered from the deaf community that there was a need for a deaf arts officer, to really pull together and gather the resources and the responses from the community to grow most importantly participation in the arts.

So, many years later, Accessible Arts were very successful... Was it 2014? We secured funding for a deaf arts officer, and I worked closely with (Inaudible) and Sofya Gollan, they have been invaluable support in growing our programs. Providing interpreters was key as well.

Those three organisations have helped us grow the program, and grow the opportunity for deaf artist lead Auslan tours.

So this idea, there were lots of discussions around funding and how we were going to do this. I changed a few budgets at work and said this has to happen.

The impetus came with a wonderful deaf artist, Stefan Kater, being a finalist in the Sulman Prize and entering the Archibald Prize.

It was an opportunity to ask him about his own practice in the Archibald prize, and through Stefan Kater, we were able to, with funding from exhibitions, really pilot deaf artist lead programs.

That is his tool in the Archibald instalment, which was delivered not as a mainstream program, but mainstream after-hours, targeted to the deaf community.

We had about 40 to 50 people come, a bit more than half from the deaf community, the rest general public coming to hear about his work, the way he constructed the work, the way he had entered the Archibald and the Sulman, and was lucky enough to be in the Sulman.

Earlier in 2006, I thought... I looked back through my numbers and all the Biennale had an opportunity, it was always an event the deaf frequented. We asked Danny Wright, we put a call out through Accessible Arts, Sofya's networks, we asked deaf artists and presenters if they wanted to present at the gallery. We supplied them with information, set out some dates, had three artists come back and say those dates are suitable, I would like to be involved.

We ran a session on a Saturday, the artists were invited in with Auslan interpreters. We went through the exhibition. We presented models for talking about art, how to facilitate discussion.

From community feedback, the opportunity for the deaf community to have a facilitated discussion, a dialogue more than a lecture, was a really key point we took away.

Luke's talk in Victoria was very similar consultation and feedback. Providing a deaf artist to present, to share, not only to give information but to give their personal response to the art making was important as well.

So we ran... You will notice with our programming, I tried to create as many opportunities... That was another thing the deaf community mentioned. We traditionally run our programs on the last Sunday of the month, but for some audiences Sunday is not a good time, there might be family gatherings, religious celebrations, there might be sport on.

So we tried to spread out the Biennale program over Wednesday evenings, Art After Hours as well as Sundays, and the training happened on a Saturday. Trying to give diverse times to allow a wider audience to access.

We ran programs on the Sunday, and I have to say both Danny and Stefan were overwhelmed with responses.

Having the artists have a Facebook page, have it on Accessible Arts' website, but also having the support of the Deaf Society who created videos that were on their website, created a flurry of discussion on Facebook. I know for the Sunday event we had over 45 people attend.

We had two interpreters, it was an unexpected outcome. But that great number would come. So in hindsight, we probably could have run two programs on that day. They were the learnings we gathered from that.

As a consequence of our deaf lead programs we have been able to engage with the deaf community on a wider basis. We have commissioned Danny Wright to present Auslan presentations for the Frieda Carlow and Diego Rivera exhibition recently.

Danny was presenting for the Sunday program, and we again experimented with a model. The gallery decided not to run any tours for the Frieda Carlow exhibition because of the format of that exhibition.

We decided to prepare them for the exhibition, we had a PowerPoint presentation with Danny Wright, we presented her with material, a PowerPoint, she went off and research debt and gave it her artist's impression.

Through that we had the offshoot of a presentation through the (inaudible) Centre, we had a number of ladies attend and for the first time ran a deafblind program within that. We had six Auslan interpreters within that program.

Within these deaf lead programs we are also employing interpreters to take Auslan into English.

We want to take deaf presenters as artists giving artist talks, so we can have a diverse audience.

Very briefly, we have a model of training the artists together. Danny Wright was asked to give an Archibald prize as part of the Art After Hours program, and we invited Stefan Kater to give another prize in the Sulman competition.

He submitted works this year, what it was like to be an artist and be involved in that sort of horse race of getting the work submitted, what it feels like, and the anxiety to get a work finished and hopefully selected.

Again, one of the unexpected outcomes was the Auslan interpreting to English. Which makes it a mainstream program as well.

Our focus is definitely the deaf community, but as a secondary situation of building the profile of our artists, often in a program you will get general public tagging along as well, which I think is really fantastic.

What I find amazing about these Auslan programs, there is genuine dialogue with the community. You can see Stefan picking our people and inviting people to challenge ideas and give their personal response.

Just to recap, access programs are opportunities for engagement with works of art, challenging ideas and again and opportunity for self-expression and hopefully an engagement with art making.

Thank you very much.

ALEX JONES:

Thank you, Danielle, I can assure you the electronic marketing program is working, I have a program for my son, which he thoroughly enjoys, and also his brother who is hearing, they can go together and interact in the same program.

It has an impact not just on the person with disability but on their family as well, and the environment.

We can go as a collective family, it is not just one targeted member of the family. The people on the panel have created this accessible environment. We only have time for 2 questions, we can't drag this out for too much longer.

Are there any questions from the audience?

QUESTION FROM FLOOR:

In terms of how the word spread through the community, was that word of mouth, was it an organic process or a campaign of marketing communications undertaken to get the word out to people?

HEATHER MARSH:

I know the gallery has its own tool but it is limited to the people who are signed up for it. We did it through Facebook, there wasn't just one thing we did. We worked hard to get the word out there. I told a friend who told another friend who got the concept out.

But we mainly put it on Facebook, anything to do with the video. We promoted it through video, contact with other deaf people and organisations who could spread the word.

The deaf community, it was a lot of marketing through the deaf community and natural channels. Tell your friends, tell that person, tell that person. The deaf community works that way, it is a Chinese whispers environment.

SPEAKER:

And also Arts Access Victoria put the word out through our Deaf Arts Network. That reached a large audience immediately. And I think the tour was sold out, subscribed completely within a couple of days, wasn't it?

QUESTION FROM FLOOR:

My question is about the deaf-led tours. I'm interested in deaf people's experience of space and this is an opportunity to look at how visitors experience the space of the gallery. Luke, how did you think about moving through the space and experiencing at in a visual sense as well and collaboratively discussing, as was my experience of Danny's tour at the Art Gallery of NSW. If you could speak about that, that would be great.

LUKE KING:

Auslan has its own parameters. We look at hand shape, orientation and space, movement. We have those five parameters we work with but we need to use all of them to describe what we are looking at.

You need background knowledge to connect to the artwork and when you are describing it you need that knowledge. You need to see if you are getting that reciprocation, the nods. I am a strong believer, particularly in children having that interaction early will allow them to be more interactive at a later stage.

Auslan has its limitations but we are growing the language.

SPEAKER:

What I would like to add from Luke's comments, it is a new venture here in Australia, having Deaf-led to us for a deaf audience. It is becoming almost like a deaf space at the gallery. We have our own culture, our own nuances, our own connection, our own visual mind as to how we look at things and perceive things where people can look at things and respond to things, it is how we can look at things visually.

It's a powerful experience for deaf people.

SPEAKER:

It makes me think, Alex, that presenters were talking about the opportunities for the hearing community to hear a deaf artist about their work. Equally there would be opportunities for the hearing, opportunities to come and learn from people. In hearing culture, I think that is a cultural exchange we could enjoy.

ALEX JONES:

One last question? For anyone on the panel? Going once...

QUESTION FROM FLOOR:

This might be a bit off topic, I am interested in video art. When I went to the Art Gallery of New South Wales and saw Manifesto. I know video artists don't want captions on their work, what can we do about video installations?

I asked someone on the desk whether there were transcripts. He said anyone can get them online. I was wondering what galleries do for video works for deaf visitors.

SPEAKER:

In most situations the text is put online. For this particular Manifesto work, there is a publication that goes with it. I have had some deaf students who have contacted me and asked for that material.

For the gallery, because the work is an artist worked, we need to look at alternatives. In the exhibition space we place a catalogue. I think things like iPads can be used in different spaces. For the Frida Kahlo exhibition we had home movies from her archive.

There was a conscious decision not to include sound to make it more inclusive. There was a suite of handwritten letters with minuscule handwriting and they were placed onto iPads. I think technology is an area that the digital platform is where it will move to.

QUESTION FROM FLOOR:

(Inaudible)

SPEAKER:

The digital team, basically the website is doing tremendous things around access. If I can mention one thing – the Archibald prize is up at the moment and if anyone goes on to that then looks up the finalist, every finalist has an Auslan video.

The Archibald has an Auslan video. We are working to have online audio descriptions for every finalist, 51 works. That is a digital thing. It needs to be built into the platform itself. We have been talking about that for three years and recently got funding.

The reason why it was started with the Archibald prize is as a touring prize, will go to 7 regional galleries around the state. We hope there will be an impetus for a wider audience to visit that exhibition, the deaf community and low vision.

ALEX JONES:

Thank you so much, I'm conscious of time. We have the next session starting now. Firstly, I just want to thank the panel for their talks on access in service. Thanks very much.

(Applause)

Please don't leave, I have a present to give you. I also want to say thank you for sharing your information about the future, pathways and good practice on what we're able to do in terms of technology, and using people with a disability for running those tours in the future. Thank you.

(Applause)