Irish visual artist Clare McLaughlin presents Shut Your Eyes and See on Bloomsday, Tuesday, 16 June at Sandymount Strand. Running from 10am to 5pm in 20-minute sessions, the free event invites participants to experience selected passages from James Joyce’s Ulysses through touch, imagination and guided sensory engagement.

Clare’s work centres on opening up gallery spaces that are often assumed to be inaccessible to blind and visually impaired people. With Shut Your Eyes And See, McLaughlin turns to Joyce as both a literary giant and a writer whose visual impairment shaped his experience of the world. For McLaughlin, this offers a powerful and underexplored way into Ulysses: through touch, sound, memory and imagination, not only through sight. In her works: “James Joyce was visually impaired, and that changed the way I read Ulysses. When I discovered more about his eyesight and returned to the book, its sensory descriptions made new sense to me.”

This project invites people to encounter Joyce through those sensory elements. Clare hopes to bring wider attention not only to Joyce’s visual impairment but also to the importance of making art and culture accessible in meaningful, imaginative ways.

The event is free. Early registration is advisable. Please email claremclaughlinemail@gmail.com.

Please note that the details of events listed above are provided by the relevant Local Authorities.