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Smudged: collaboratively developed and performed site-specific performance piece

Fox’s research examines and challenges perceptions and experiences of disability, social inequality and exclusion, working directly with able-bodied artists and artists with learning disabilities. Employing visual and performative methods, Fox developed a series of approaches to extending audience engagement within museums and galleries. Her research questions the effectiveness and usefulness of explanatory text and audio, and seeks to expand and provide alternative forms of meaningful engagement with, and responses to, gallery collections, for those with learning disabilities and for other excluded audiences.

Fox combined fieldwork, multiple site visits, sustained and theoretical investigations. She staged detailed discussions and negotiations with Tate Modern about the barriers and limitations that disabled adults experience when learning and attending exhibitions, and how to reformulate and shape alternative experiences. Working in close collaboration with the Corali Dance Company and the Rocket Artists, she undertook six weeks of intensive action research and developed modes of performative and visual expression that enabled and allowed for equal and inclusive creative partnerships. These involved choreographic and curatorial combinations and included movement, live projections, words, sound, music and drawing.

This research and resultant creative response, titled ‘Smudged’, is a site-specific work that engaged directly with Tate Modern’s ‘Ideas and Objects’ exhibition. It culminated for the artists in a 30-minute performance to an audience of artists, performers, educators, journalists, art funders, carers and friends. The performance and research findings feature on a Tate-sponsored film (‘Creative Futures’) that is currently used to assist in developing approaches to engagement across all London’s museums and galleries. Fox discusses her research findings in a book chapter for MuseumsEtc, as well as presenting new ways for scholars, curators and practitioners to consider how to develop exhibition designs and curatorial practice, and extend audience participation.