“A naked woman kneeling, wearing a toilet roll attached by hosiery to her groin area. On her face is a mask with egg carton eyes.”
These are the images in a Tactile Mind –a pornographic book for the blind by Lisa Murphy. The book has raised tactile images of people in sexual poses with the description written in braille along side of it.
The Toronto based artist is a photographer with a certificate in Tactile Graphics from the CNIB. She says that when she looked around, she found that the blind were overlooked in the world filled with sexual images. Although Playboy had attempted to take hold of this market a few years ago, the books only had braille descriptions–no images.
But Murphy’s project is far from the $10 copies of smut you will find at your local Max convenience.
Tactile Minds consists of 17 3-D images. These pictures depict live models photographed by Murphy. She transformed these photos into page after page of sculpted art, laid out on thermoform plastic. Each book is self-published and hand-made.
“There’s so much work that’s gone into it, from the models to the Braille…($255 CAD is) not an unreasonable price,” she points out to QMI Agency.
Murphy has lugged this large book around from sex show to sex show for years now, “It was a labour of love and I never expected to make any money from it.”
But with the recent jolt of publicity–the orders have been pouring in.
This isn’t the end for the Toronto artist–she has plans to take things one step further, saying that here next project will “ be much more erotic…with couples.”
