Several years ago, Dr Ellen Adams from the Department of Classics at King’s started attending Deaf-led museum tours delivered in British Sign Language (BSL).

BSL is a visual spatial language which uses the body and the signing space – the area in front of the body – to communicate meaning through a series of shapes, gestures, and facial expressions. The form and arrangement of expressions are equally valuable to their construction of meaning for BSL signers. As such, the signing space is as much a representational space as it is a syntactic one.

Dr Adams goes on to explain that “as art tends to be either visual or material, or both, the gap between the two modalities of a visual language and visual perception feels much smaller. Furthermore, signed languages are simultaneous. Numerous aspects of meaning are conveyed and registered at the same time, in the same way you might behold an artwork in its entirety. Spoken language, on the other hand, is confined to one word at a time. Even if expression and intonation can embellish meaning, it is much more linear and limited than sign language.”

Prompted by her observations, Dr Adams quickly established a network of access staff, who are trained and dedicated to improving accessibility for visitors in museums and galleries. The Museum Access Network for Sensory Impairments, London (MANSIL), sets out to change attitudes towards disabled people and their potential to contribute to the cultural sector.

After becoming the recipient of a Major Impact Award from King’s Faculty of Arts & Humanities, Dr Adams extended the work of MANSIL by exploring approaches to art appreciation through the lens of access provision for people with sensory impairments, focusing on two specific objects: the Minoan Snake Goddesses.

The Many Lives of a Snake Goddess

The Many Lives of Snake Goddess (MLSG) project is a collaboration between Dr Adams and colleagues at University of Bristol and Trinity College Dublin which set out to investigate how museum access programmes might give way to alternative ways of encountering and interpreting artworks and museum objects through audio description (AD), touch tours, and BSL.

The project took as its subject the so-called ‘Snake Goddesses’, two statuettes from Minoan (Bronze Age) Crete dating to c. 1600 BCE which were first found in Knossos in 1903 and now exhibited at the Heraklion Archaeological Museum in Crete. The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford currently houses plaster replicas of the statuettes, which were used in the project.

Throughout history, cultural practitioners across art, music, dance, opera, and literature have forged their own interpretations of the figurines. The MSLG project considers how they have been reconstructed and re-imagined since their discovery and how they might be reinterpreted today through the lens of different sensory experiences.

New Perspectives

The British poet, novelist and non-fiction writer, Ruth Padel was commissioned to write 15 new poems based on the Snake Goddesses. Padel’s poems highlighted a parallel between creative writing and the role of audio description (AD) as a form of creative spoken language and an example of intermodal translation. A number of Padel’s poems took the form of calligrams, where words are positioned to create a visual image of the subjects represented.

The Impact Award allowed for the expansion of the MSLG project through the commission of further contributions by creative practitioners, each of whom engaged with the Snake Goddesses from the perspective of different sensory impairments. Karly Allen, an audio describer, produced a detailed portrayal of one of the figurines. Tanvir Bush, a blind creative writer, recorded three pieces which reflected her handling of and engagement with the statuettes. Zoë McWhinney, a Deaf actor, provided two information films on the Snake Goddesses, and translated two of Padel’s poems into BSL. Finally, the project commissioned a mindfulness activity to consider how art and ‘slow looking’ can promote wellbeing.

The resulting works provided a multi-faceted exploration into how different styles of English and modes of communication allow us to engage with objects differently, and encouraged a reconsideration of how people might interact with culture and art. Focus group feedback suggested that the project’s findings also have the potential to benefit ‘mainstream audiences’, with a number of participants commenting on how Karly Allen’s AD contribution drew attention to details in the work they’d not previously noticed.

Frank Barnes School for Deaf Children

The impact of Dr Adams’ research is ongoing. In 2023, she and Zoë McWhinney collaborated on a further set of information films about the Parthenon sculptures in the British Museum. At the beginning of 2024, these videos were trialled by the Frank Barnes School for Deaf Children, a bilingual (English and BSL) school based in King’s Cross, London, as part of a new BSL curriculum. Lisa Smith, a Deaf instructor at the school, reflected positively on the experience.

For Dr Adams’ the main impact of the award has been the possibility of exploring and identifying further opportunities which will amplify the “voice and agency of Deaf or blind and partially sighted people in the cultural sector”.

Further reading

Dr Adams participated in a talk on the project’s work at the Knossos Research Centre in Athens in 2024 — which can be found here.

A new article Accessing Art and Heritage Through a Visual-Spatial Language: In-person and Digital British Sign Language Museum Tours has been published in the Journal of Museum Education in January 2025.

You can also read a report into the project's impact here.

The introduction to her edited volume, Disability Studies and the Classical Body: The Forgotten Other has also been made available by Routledge, and is available to read here.