Arusa Qureshi talks to Emily Nicholl & Ellen Renton about the creation of their audio-zine, “Wandering: on sight and sense-making”
In the ever-evolving landscape of contemporary performance, poet Ellen Renton and multidisciplinary artist Emily Nicholl are redefining what it means to make inclusive art. Through their thoughtful, collaborative work supported by Independent Arts Projects (IAP), the duo is not only expanding the boundaries of their own practices but also rethinking how performance and poetry can be experienced when vision is no longer the assumed starting point.
Ellen’s practice as a poet is deeply rooted in language, but her work often spills beyond the page, into collaborations with music, theatre, and movement. Living with visual impairment, she weaves that experience into both the form and content of her practice. “I’m interested in where poetry can sit alongside other things,” she says. “And I’m interested in incorporating into that my experience of disability, and how those things are connected; the social experience of disability and how my experience of visual impairment as a purely visual sensorial experience can impact writing in terms of language and perspective.”
Emily, whose background is in circus and performance, comes to art-making through a multifaceted lens – one that includes producing, photography, activism, and a shifting relationship to her own body due to arthritis. “My practice changes very often,” she reflects. “But I’m interested in forms of collaboration and where different disciplines or ways of thinking about things can meet.”
Their partnership began with a project titled How Do You Take a Photo of a Dinosaur?, which was co-commissioned by Imaginate and the National Museum of Scotland as part of Edinburgh International Children’s Festival Family Encounters day. The project was a playful yet probing inquiry into how performance can be made accessible and engaging for blind and partially sighted children. “We started wondering why there was so little work made for this audience,” Ellen says. “And whether there was even an appetite for it from producers.” That line of questioning would eventually lead them to IAP, where the pair undertook a residency to explore discussions around work made for visually impaired audiences.
“IAP is an organisation really focused on supporting the artists and the collaboration and the time that that might take,” says Emily. “Working with them allowed us to slow down a little bit, meet properly and have a rethink, and work out what that collaboration might be, or even just what our questions are before we go into making something again.”
Instead of racing toward a polished production, Ellen and Emily chose to focus on process. “It feels like making the show is the only thing that people ever see,” Ellen explains, “whereas actually all these discussions and all this research and all the things we’d put into it, I think it felt important to share that with other people in a way that hopefully might affect the making of their own work, or make people consider their own practice.”
This approach culminated in the development of an audio zine – a recorded document of their conversations, ideas, and research. Rather than focusing on a traditional performance, the audio zine foregrounds the questions they’ve been asking: How can we create art that doesn’t rely on vision? What does it mean to collaborate across different lived experiences of disability? And how can the act of making become a form of protest against a world that too often excludes disabled people?
The audio zine emerged from three thematic pillars that shaped their collaboration: decentering vision, embracing collaboration and conversation, and engaging with the outdoors and the senses. In creating the zine, they partnered with sound artist Nik Paget-Tomlinson to explore how audio can be more than a functional access tool – it can be an artistic form in itself.
“In so much of the discussion about access,” Ellen begins, “there’s this plastering over a problem kind of attitude towards it, like it’s this extra cost and actually, it’s quite a joyful thing to start with this creative challenge of, ‘what if we just imagined the world a wee bit differently?’”
Their work directly challenges the hierarchy of the senses, especially the dominance of sight in both the creation and consumption of art. As Ellen continues, “There’s so much work for disabled audiences where the process would exclude those audiences, because there’s an assumption that disabled artists aren’t making the work. We were very aware of that and wanted to make something where we were practicing what we preached in what we were doing.”
The pair’s research and collaboration is rich with insight into how disability – not as deficit, but as difference – can transform artistic processes. Ellen speaks to the slow, cumulative change that has come from working collaboratively over time: “It’s changed how I think, not just about access but about what art can be, and who it’s for.”
For Emily, the project sparked deep personal reflection, helping her to interrogate her own internalised ableism and question her sensory biases. “As a sighted person, I’ve had to think carefully about my place in this work,” she says. “If you don’t have that lived experience, I think it is important to reflect on your own position and your own lived experience, wondering where they meet, or what you have to learn about someone else’s lived experience that can challenge any preconceptions that you have.
“I’ve always centered vision as the top hierarchy in the hierarchy of senses. Or I rely on it so much. But it’s not the only way of understanding the world, and it doesn’t mean it’s better than someone else’s lived experience. Learning from Ellen and from other disabled artists makes me reflect and think, there are so many ways of being or ways of generating knowledge that I don’t have, that are really interesting and really valuable.”
Ellen adds that the project has reshaped how she views her own impairment. “I think it’s really shaped how I approach work, in terms of making space for a multiplicity of experiences. But it’s also taught me in my own life to not view my vision as this lesser half of what everyone else has, or a percentage of what everyone else has and to acknowledge that everyone around me is also experiencing things differently, and will experience a piece of work differently.”
Rooted in their lived experiences, the audio zine works to challenge dominant norms around accessibility, authorship, and the senses – inviting audiences and fellow artists alike to reimagine how we experience and make art. In this way, their work is as political as it is poetic. In a climate where disabled people are increasingly marginalised, particularly through recent UK government policies targeting disability support, Ellen and Emily see their work as a quiet but powerful form of resistance.
“I feel like any work for this audience, or any way in which we can make the presence of disabled people felt, is very important to keep people present in the world, and keep drawing attention to this audience,” Ellen explains. “But also it’s important for those audiences themselves to be made to feel like their presence is wanted in the world, because I think that’s really what we’re up against, and what a lot of disabled people are feeling just now – that they are unwanted and undervalued. There are lots of other ways of protesting that and fighting that feeling, and it feels like acknowledging people’s different experiences, the way that we’re trying to do – to me, that feels like one of the ways of doing that.”
“If there isn’t any work made specifically for a blind or partially blind audience,” Emily says, “the world can feel more disabling and excluding, and especially in the arts, where there are already so many barriers to accessing arts in many different forms. It’s really joyful and really creatively joyful to think, ‘how can I just come at this question from a different angle?’”
Their audio zine, then, is more than documentation. It’s a manifesto of sorts – one that suggests there are infinite, joyful, and radical ways to build access into the core of art-making. Crucially, it doesn’t offer neat answers; instead it presents a series of open-ended inquiries designed to spark further reflection. For both artists, this feels like just the beginning.
“I hope in the short term that the recording opens conversations for people listening to it, “ Ellen says. “I hope that it might encourage people to question things in their own practice and why they’re doing things a certain way, and open the conversations that might come from that – I think that could be quite exciting.”
“It’d be really great to hear people’s responses, or to continue the conversation, “ Emily adds, “because we specifically ask questions rather than give answers. We’re interested in how the possible answers to the questions change, or how they’re informed by different people’s own perspectives.”
In a sector that is often driven by outcomes, deadlines, and polish, Ellen and Emily’s work stands as an invitation to imagine differently, to make space for slower, deeper, more inclusive ways of making. Through this project and their future work, they hope that they can encourage dialogue, influence other makers, and open up more space for disabled-led and disability-informed artistic practice.
>> Wandering: On sight and sense-making audio zine
Arusa Qureshi is a writer, editor and music programmer based in Edinburgh. She is the current Editor of Fest and the former Editor of The List and writes mostly about music, most recently Flip the Script – a book about women in UK hip hop, published by 404 Ink. Her work has appeared in the Scotsman, Clash, the Guardian, GoldFlakePaint, Time Out, the Quietus, NME and more. She chairs the board of the Scottish Music Centre, sits on the board of the Music Venue Trust and is the co-curator of the award-winning Amplifi series at Edinburgh’s Queens Hall. arusaqureshi.com