A vision for all to see
Low vision visual artist and academic Dr Erica Tandori draws on Turner’s turbulent skies – and her own deteriorating sight – to create a new body of work that asks what it really means to see.
It was at London’s Tate Britain gallery, standing in front of a 200-year-old oil painting of a vast skyscape by J.M.W. Turner, that artist Erica Tandori was struck by a sense of recognition.
“To see the little sun in the sky, this little orb, it was like, ‘That’s my scotoma’,” she recalls. “Did Turner have something like my vision? Because what happens with my scotoma is that I’m constantly seeing the world through an impressionist lens. But it’s moving, so it’s got the Van Gogh quality and it’s got the Monet softness. But then when I looked at Turner, it’s the scotoma, the central vision.”
A scotoma is the hallmark of Stargardt disease, a genetic form of macular degeneration that has progressively stolen her central vision since her early twenties. It appears not as the black spot often described by ophthalmologists, but as something far more striking.
“It’s this pulsating orb that glitters and scintillates and spreads across the visual field. What that does to colour, to the visual, to the world around you is really spectacular,” Tandori says.
The visit to the Tate also gave her a new idea.
“How do I make others see what I see? Because as terrible as it is to be losing your vision, there’s actually something really fascinating about what it’s doing to your perception. This is what I’m trying to describe in my oil painting now in this body of work.”
Tandori is creating a series of large, visceral, atmospheric canvases of skies. Many begin with photos she snaps through the car window on her phone.
“You can’t see the landscape when you’re blind or legally blind and you’re in the passenger seat and you’re driving past,” she says. “But then it’s revealed to me on a large screen and there are magical moments in the bush, the way a cloud is sitting behind a tree or a branch in the blue sky.”
Most gallery visitors are used to an invisible barrier between themselves and artworks. Tandori is breaking down that barrier to show that we experience art not just through our eyes, and that those who’ve lost vision, or never had it, are not excluded from its power.
“I want to invite people to touch the surface of these paintings so they can explore them on many levels. There’s the tactility of it, what the oil paint embodies. It’s magical stuff,” she says.
“There’s a lot to be said and done about how we make art accessible and how we bring people with low vision, blindness and diverse needs into the conversation around visual art. How can I step across into that world as a legally blind artist and make it meaningful? Because we haven’t lost our minds, we’ve just lost our retinas.”
Art has been in Tandori’s bones since birth. She grew up in a family that ran an art gallery and framing shop in the Naarm (Melbourne) suburb of Armadale, and sold her first work – a gouache landscape – at just 11 years old.
But the diagnosis at 23, while studying painting at the Victorian College of the Arts, nearly ended her young career.
“From the age of 23, within six months it went from, ‘Oh, there’s a spot in my central vision’ to, ‘Oh my God, I’m legally blind. I can’t see faces, I can’t drive, I can’t read’.”
Doctors told her to leave art school. She didn’t. After a period exploring acting, film and singing – asking herself what she would do creatively if she lost her sight entirely – Tandori came back to visual art.
Her PhD used oil painting to document the lived experience of vision loss, which led to seven years as artist-in-residence at Monash University’s Rossjohn Lab. There, Tandori and collaborator, Dr Stu Favilla, created award-winning multisensory science exhibitions for people who are blind, have low vision or have diverse needs – touring Australia and exhibiting at Cambridge in the UK.
The new work also uses a centuries-old artform to speak to the present.
“The idea operates on a few levels,” she says. “It’s the relevance of Turner in our current times. It speaks to the vulnerability of vision. It speaks to multi-sensory perception. It speaks to rising above one’s condition.”
Turner’s apocalyptic skies pulse with the visual disturbance Tandori experiences daily.
“As a blind viewer of Turner, I’m recognised so much in what he painted. And then I think about the world we’re heading into.”
It’s a conviction that shapes her creative practice even as her vision continues to deteriorate – accelerated, she believes, by years of screen time. But she points to the long history of artists like Degas, Monet and Turner who made extraordinary work even as their eyes failed.
“I’m exploring this amazing technology and the power of oil paint and the power of pigment all over again. We’ve had a 600-year conversation and I want to be part of it, even though I’m legally blind.”
These days, her studio is a place of reinvention. She and Favilla constantly adjust conditions – lamps, magnifying glasses and an enlarging monitor – to meet the shifting demands of the disease.
“From day to day, your vision changes with this disease. Light conditions also change in the studio. A beautiful sunny day will be fantastic at a certain angle. On the other hand, it will create glare. ‘Was that phthalo blue I just used? Oh, Jesus, I didn’t mean to use that. I meant to use ultramarine. I’ve got the wrong blue’.”
Yet within that daily battle something else happens.
“There are many moments where you’re no longer blind. You’re operating on such a different level that it goes beyond the retina, it goes beyond the body. You’re communicating an inner vision that is not blind,” she says.
Tandori is creating the work with the assistance of Creative Australia’s Arts and Disability Initiative, a funding program specifically for d/Deaf and disabled artists and arts workers. Its impact, she says, goes beyond financial value.
“It’s a nod of recognition that ‘You’re a blind visual artist and you’ve got an idea that may be worth something’. It’s an affirmation that ignites the spark again to keep on going.”
That spark, she hopes, will also reach future generations – the young art student who hears the same words she heard as a 23-year-old and also refuses to believe them.
“I want other people with low vision and blindness to know that they can battle through it if they want to. Why not?”
Tandori’s new work will be exhibited in December 2026 at Art & Collectors gallery on Gertrude Street, Fitzroy. The Arts and Disability Initiative from Creative Australia supports d/Deaf and disabled artists and arts workers to develop new work and build their practice, skills and creative networks. Applications for the next round of funding close on Tuesday 7 July 2026, 3pm AEST. Find out more about the Arts and Disability Initiative and application details.
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