To celebrate 200 years of Braille, VICTA is delivering a Parent Workshop which examines artistic and colourful ways to engage your child with Braille. We are pleased to be working with VICTA Patron, Clarke Reynolds, The Blind Braille Artist to bring this session to your computer screens.
Clarke Reynolds (Mr Dot) is a vision impaired artist whose work focuses on breaking down barriers and transforming how society interacts with Braille and tactile experiences. His journey from a sighted creative to a blind artist, highlights how losing his vision allowed him to find a deeper artistic voice. His work challenges conventional notions of Braille, pushing it beyond mere functionality into a bold, visually significant medium that can stand side by side with other forms of popular art. Clarke’s artistic philosophy is rooted in normalising Braille as an integral part of our surroundings, much like how we overlook everyday typography. His projects demonstrate how Braille can be both tactile and visually engaging.
Through these works, Clarke encourages audiences to interact with Braille not just as a language but as an artistic form, offering layers of meaning that go beyond sight alone. Clarke’s goal is to inspire the next generation of vision impaired people (VIPs) to embrace their creativity, demonstrating that blindness is not a barrier but a different way of seeing and contributing to the world of art; most importantly by going into schools and teaching Braille through art by breaking down the stigma attached to sight loss. By incorporating Braille into the visual world, he hopes to shift societal perceptions and make art accessible to everyone, regardless of ability. His work has been exhibited in the USA, India and London, with multiple tv, radio and newspaper appearances, he offers both artistic insights and personal reflections on his evolving creative process and his life.
Clarke’s motto is “inclusion doesn’t have to be boring”. As an ambassador for Fight for Sight and a patron for VICTA, Clarke, is passionate about making a difference and being seen. His concept is to teach braille through fun, “Remember how we learnt ABC as a child through word association A is for apple etc. Taking the braille cell and letting it host the alphabet through shape not the actual dot because braille is about the negative spaces.”
Outcome
After the session you will take with you the fun of learning braille, thinking outside the box and not over complicating it. By just learning A to Z, the brain will absorb the information, thinking of it as a pattern and not as an individual dot and how the negative spaces form amazing paths especially when you write lots! Because remember, you learn faster if it’s playful!
This session is for parents of children who are currently learning braille, considering developing it into a skill and also for parents of children who are interested in art. The first 90 minutes will be a presentation from Clarke, followed by a 30 min Q&A.
