Finger Talk, Wellcome Collection
Deaf Architecture Front has worked as DeafSpace consultant to The Wellcome Collection, providing strategic advice on improving accessibility for Deaf visitors to the organisation’s public spaces and exhibitions. Our work involved analysing existing environments, documenting barriers to access, and developing recommendations aligned with DeafSpace principles to support more inclusive design.
We have also supported two Deaf-led exhibitions and performances, ensuring that the spatial layout, communication environments and visitor experience were accessible and culturally appropriate. Working closely with artists, curators, and designers, we helped shape exhibitions designed by Studio Naama, embedding Deaf-led perspectives throughout the creative process.
This work reflects our commitment to advancing inclusive cultural spaces and supporting Deaf artists, audiences and practitioners within major national institutions.
Finger Talk is a Deaf-led performance and storytelling programme by Cathy Mager, placing British Sign Language, movement, and visual communication within exhibition spaces.
Visitors are invited to step out of a hearing-centred worldand into a space shaped by deaf perspectives, foregrounding BSL as a living, evolving language with a rich cultural history. The performers’ movements are expressed through Visual Vernacular (VV), a type of storytelling that combinessign language and mime.
The installation also reproduces illustrations from early fingerspelling, dating from the seventeenth century onwards, that were drawn, printed and distributed by deaf people. Rare historic footage from the British Deaf Association shows early depictions of people using BSL while socialising at picnics and sporting events. These clips provide insight into the history of the British Deaf community in a way that has rarely been seen.