The unseen

5 minute read. Content warning: None

• What are the pieces that make you, you? (1) 

chatGPT Summary: Kay reflects on the challenges of a visual art project involving body silhouettes and visual description, navigating space constraints, creative access practices, and the complexities of describing the unseen.

The plan:

I cut 31 pieces of kraft paper, the longest slightly taller than I am (5’6”), with each subsequent page 3 inches shorter. On each page, I intended to paint an outline silhouette of myself along with a visual description. As the pages got shorter, I planned to crop from the bottom, leaving only part of my head on the smallest page. Numbering each page, I created a list and named something about my physical body. As things disappeared through the crop, I intended to visually describe what was missing.

The hope:

This exercise will be a way for me to practice visual description, which is quite important to me and is generally only supported or prioritized when there are identified Blind or non-visual people in the room (and sometimes, even then, it’s overlooked). I enjoy visual description as an access practice and as a moment to discover what is important to the people gathered. When sighted people do visual description, they often start describing what they see, which I have found often leads to a lot of sighted verbs, such as, “As you can see behind me…” or “You can see my sweater, which is…,” missing the point when it is practiced for a non-visual audience. However, I rarely find that it bothers non-visual people when I chat with them later. Sighted language is everywhere, and usually, a savior mentality rails against it on behalf of non-visual participants.

When it comes to hearing specific language, I am also not bothered when people say things like “You can hear…” or “I can hear” as long as a description follows. For me, imperfect attempts such as description, transcription, and captions are a sign of care because they show an effort to provide information to those who don’t have it. I only get upset by hearing-centric language when access practices are dismissed, ridiculed, or automation is considered “good enough.”

My goal in this exercise is to respond to KM’s prompt very literally, considering body parts and unseen elements as pieces that make up me while also practicing visual description. I wanted to tell rather than show what I was describing to challenge the reliance on sight within a visual artist’s creative access process, forcing the viewer to focus on the words, not just the accompanying body part.

In action:

As I started sketching and planning, I quickly realized a significant challenge in my concept. I can’t see my body parts when focusing on the literal unseen. I could go and get an x-ray or photos from a surgeon, but without this level of commitment, I could not see things such as my heart and veins. What would I describe in this practice if I wanted to go beneath the skin? Would it be an extrapolation of what I thought these pieces looked like based on medical references of other white bodies? Should I lean into my ignorance here and not approach it from a medical perspective, using non-visual terms related to feelings, actions, or other senses to build a visual picture? I could do away with the pretense of visuals and instead narrate the unseen using fantasy and unreal descriptions.

In the end, I decided to have a blended list made of body parts that are generally covered or obscured in some way, such as my feet, armpits, genitals, or tummy, as well as things that were generally visible, such as my eyes, hair, or hands and a few choice unseen things such as my heart, lungs, and brain. With that, I decided not to explicitly name what I was describing on each page. The viewer or reader would need to focus solely on the information they were provided and would be required to confront any assumptions they had made about what I was describing based on the omission or lack of information. One might assume I was describing my breast, armpit, or collarbone from a crop, but the writing describes the organ keeping me alive.

Table: Perceivable, Covered, and Imagined

A table summarizing body parts identified for the project (31) categorized as perceivable, covered/obscured, and imagined. The table helps explore the visibility and perception of different body parts.

Body Part	Perceivable	Covered/Obscured	Imagined
Age and/or Skin	X	X
Societal Markers	X	X	X
Height/Posture	X
Toes		X
Ankle (and foot)	X	X
Calf	X
Knees	X
Thigh (butt)	X	X
Fingers	X
Wrists (forearms)	X
Genitals		X
Intestines (gut)		X	X
Tummy (lower torso)	X	X
Elbows	X
Back	X	X
Arms (upper arms)	X
Breasts	X	X
Heart		X	X
Arm pits		X
Lungs		X	X
Shoulder/Collarbone	X	X
Neck	X
Chin	X
Mouth	X
Teeth/Tongue		X
Nose	X
Cheek	X
Ear 1	X
Ear 2	X
Eyes/eyebrows	X
Forehead/hair	X

The pre-work was tedious, and I struggled to cut the pieces on the floor of my apartment (and missed my old studio space). Whenever I work on the floor of my apartment, my cat becomes a part of the process. He would take every opportunity to sit in the center of the rolled-out paper, impeding an already cumbersome process. Good thing he’s cute. When I was done, I had cut approximately 16.5 meters (651 inches/54 feet) of paper and had giant rolls standing in fat columns around my space.

For the largest pieces, I gessoed the surfaces, assuming the paper wouldn’t hold black ink without a ground. I wanted each piece to be uniformly black except for the white silhouette left where I traced my body. I would draw my text or doodles on each black section. This would invoke visuals similar to Jill Henderson’s illustrations, with high-contrast marks in white chalk or conté.

This made an already difficult and cramped process more challenging, and with the understanding that our collective process this summer did not need to yield completed works, I am contemplating using ungessoed kraft on other pages past the initial first set. I can tell myself that I am allowing space to compare and contrast different media and processes, but honestly, it is an acknowledgment of space limitations, safety issues presented by painting inside my live-work space, my cat as a mischief-maker, and my desire to be on good terms with my downstairs neighbors.

I haven’t abandoned the black + white gesso, but I am trying to permit myself room to experiment within this series, allowing what I produce this month to be a draft. I wanted to name this struggle because it was hard to shift towards seeing these as prototypes when I put so much labor into cutting and prepping these large surfaces. It would have been much easier if I had just stuck to my sketchbook or small-scale equivalents. Sometimes, it’s good to be confronted with things you know and be reminded of why best practices exist.

I will share some process notes and prototypes in a future post.

Technology note:

I continue to test the use of AI within my writing and artistic practice. I used chatGPT to create a summary, estimated reading time, and to suggest content warnings for this blog, and Grammarly to assist me in spelling and grammar.

I also wrote the table that I share above in Google Sheets, which is not accessible to screen readers. I exported the file as html but the table was filled with a lot of garbage, and it was still not accessible. I wrote to chatGPT asking it to clean the code, and help me prioritze access for screen readers. I had initially planned to share it as a <figure> but <table> tags are not typically contained in figures. Once chatGPT had generated <td headers> attributes associated with each row, I asked it about a table caption. It had been so long since I used a plain html table (I am partial to flexbox these days) that I had ot ask if there was a table caption tag. There was and I popped my draft <figcaption> text in there. Should you use a screen reader or voice over tool and have a weird experience accessing my embedded table, I welcome feedback.