What is it all about?

Important voices shape our lives and perceptions – eminent politicians campaigning for war or for peace, journalists cutting a sharp path through the daily proliferation of bullshit or creating it for our entertainment, crooners soothing our mood, the voices of authors that spring from pages of a book and fill our heads with adventures; Scientists making sense of our world, theologians fighting for our souls, protestors campaigning for justice or simply for our attention, villains snarling, children laughing – the voices that form such an important part of contemporary Britain. But imagine those voices without the faces and mannerisms that go with them - so familiar to most, but an unknown world to others.

The unTOUCHABLES exhibition seeks to connect the world of the blind with that of the sighted – using simple lifecasts of the faces and hands of the people whose voices stand out in contemporary British culture, with a few classic icons thrown in for good measure. These celebrities and people of note are renowned for being out of reach to the general public. They are The unTOUCHABLES. This exhibition seeks to break those boundaries by inviting blind people and sighted alike to explore the faces of these icons first hand – seeking out the texture in an icon’s stubble with their fingertips, or the ingrained worry lines on another’s forehead or the wide eyed excitement on the face of a young star.

The unTOUCHABLES is so more than a mask museum, more than a link between the sighted and unsighted worlds…it is a portrait of our time, a snapshot of an era where sound and image collide to form our collective vision of Britain today. Each face will be accompanied by its corresponding voice to guide visitors through the exhibition and ground them in the familiar – not only a snapshot then, but a soundbite of our time too.

What can visitors glean from the unTOUCHABLES exhibition through their fingertips? Can a person’s soul be captured in a simple plaster impression, as so many cultures through history have believed? In the moments of contemplation and reflection imposed by the temporary sensory deprivation of the casting procedure, what expression will be revealed? Will the image that is revealed reflect the public persona that matches the broadcast voices we are so familiar with, or reveal some hidden part of the person in question – the vulnerability, loneliness or even shyness of our most notorious performers and spokespeople?

Our society is obsessed with faces, shaped by the eternal search for ‘perfection’ where no such thing exists, where we judge on appearances within seconds of meeting someone or seeing their image – who to trust, who to fear, who to idolise. How different would our assumptions be if we ‘saw’ those visages with our fingertips rather than our eyes? Does race, class, age, gender, beauty, or even symmetry make itself as readily apparent to touch as to sight? What can these unfettered faces tell us about ourselves, our society?

When we remove hair and clothes from the equation, lifecasts become timeless. The face of Beethoven could hang beside that of Andrew Lloyd Webber without any hint that these two great composers are centuries apart. They could be brothers. We all could be. The naked face unites the human race through time and space. It is the first thing a baby is programmed to recognize, the first thing a child learns to draw, the first thing Helen Keller wanted to see, were she granted just three days of sight.

The unTOUCHABLES exhibition seeks to create a lifecast portrait of popular culture in Britain today, uniting blind and sighted visitors in the search to understand the humanity of those people whose images and voices dominate our society through the mass media, arts, politics, science and sport. To reach out and touch the human beings behind the masks.

If you are a venue owner/manager or school for the blind interested in hosting The unTOUCHABLES exhibition in the future, please get in touch with full details. Accompanying workshops are also available for educational establishments. Companies interested in sponsoring all or part of the exhibition and/or tour are also welcome to get in touch for more information. If you would like to know when this exhibition is coming to your area, or hear about our forthcoming appearance on BBC Television, please with the words 'unTOUCHABLES audience' in the subject line to be added to our mailing list.