Collaborative Artwork Description: an audio description workshop for artists

Learning Fund Case Study: Scottish Artists Union (SAU) - Highlands and Islands

The Scottish Artists Union Highlands and Islands learning project delivered ‘Collaborative Artwork Description: an audio description workshop for artists’ as a two-hour online workshop in August 2025.

Guided by blind writer, poet, and researcher Joseph Rizzo-Naudi, participants explored collaborative, blindness-led approaches to beholding, describing, and communicating artworks. The course developed learners’ knowledge of disabled-led art practice and accessible approaches, equipping them with the tools to reach a wider audience and commit to inclusive art practice by being able to provide their audience with audio descriptions of their artworks, installations and exhibitions. This learning had the added benefit of improving employability and relationships with potential employers, as galleries and arts organisations must provide inclusive and accessible exhibitions in line with equality, diversity, and inclusion policies.

Importantly, this workshop was disabled-led and blind-led. Under the ‘participation’ aim of the project which seeks to ‘ensure equality of participation for artists as workers across the sector’, the learning programmes are targeted at those who are under-represented and the approach is a collaborative, intersectional exploration of the needs of the sector. In line with this aim it is vital that learning about accessibility, disabled people, and disabled art practice is led by disabled people, tutors and artists themselves. As a Scottish Union Learning Project and as a trade union, the SAU is grateful to Joseph for the opportunity to develop learning around how to create accessible learning environments for members, whilst also supporting and advocating on behalf of disabled artist workers. This workshop also signals to the SAU’s wider membership that the union is committed to championing disabled artists and learning from their experiences, knowledge and perspectives.

The workshop was attended by 11 artists. Participants were mostly based in the Highlands and Islands, including those who live and work on the Isle of Skye, Isle of Lewis, the north-west Highlands and Inverness, as well as those based in the central belt. Joseph began by sharing his practice, speaking of his recent work along with an outline of his research and practice. A recording of this is available for SAU members in the learning resources section of the SAU website.

The workshop developed as he invited participants to draw on the union’s unique sensory, biographical, and place-based perspectives to create and communicate descriptions founded in blind knowledge making. Over the two hours, using Joseph’s deliberate and staged process of beholding and listening, participants co-created new, self-contained, language-based artworks, and reflected on experimental image description processes and practices. By turning the hierarchy of the senses on its head, Joseph’s process allowed them to learn how they might be able to explain a visual artwork through language and words, as well as understand new methods of gaining insight into how their artworks may be perceived or understood by others.

It is hoped that this course might also be able to offer useful learning across the trade union landscape. The learning achieved, based in blindness-led knowledge-making and generative collaborative approaches, may be highly useful to other sectors. This may provide particularly interesting learning development for general workplace inclusivity as well as for sectors with workers in public facing roles, with disabled service users, audiences, and the general public. However, this course also provides important learning for union projects and project workers who are keen to develop their provision of inclusive and accessible learning environments for their members.