Symposium Season
This autumn, we're participating in three symposia! First up, on the 13th of October we're running workshops for the ENGAGE Gathering at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry: The Body Knows First: Disability Gain through the Art of Sensory Co-creation.

Then, on the 21st of October, we're with the Natural History Museum at Great North Museum: Hancock for the Playful Symposium with an outdoor 
exploration of spaces and places, investigating how we can build sensory relationships with the external areas of museums and galleries, and how those relationships can help foster feelings of safety, trust, and belonging. 

Finally, on the 13th of November, we're at MK Gallery for a Sensory Symposium showcasing the theory and practice we've developed over the past two years co-producing sensory tours of major exhibitions with adults with learning disabilities and young people with sensory impairments.

Working with the National Football Museum
Over the past year, we've been working with colleagues at the National Football Museum in Manchester to develop a sensory pathway for special school visits, however what we've developed ended up becoming more of a broadbase package to support sensory embedding and sustainability: a bespoke Sensory Heritage Methodology that can be used to inform the development of future work and funding bids, sensory resources for use in the museum and via outreach, and Sensory Scout kits that can be used by groups and families to explore the galleries through textures, sounds, and engagement with space. 

We used our graphic design skills to develop bespoke resources, hunted for authentic vintage football memorabilia and contemporary football and referee kits that have seen real match-use to create characters, Touch and Match boards, and playful handling kits. It's now over to the sensational team at the National Football Museum, following our handover training day, to see how the project evolves. We know it's going to be great as they already have plans for new volunteer roles to support sensory engagement, and their curation teams are thinking about how they can use the Sensory Heritage Methodology at exhibition planning stage too.


Forest Sense
Over the summer, we partnered with the Greensand Trust in Bedfordshire to offer a range of Forest Therapy taster sessions for different groups of people with complex needs. Our session for adults with learning disabilities was so popular we had to put on another session! The success of this
pilot project means the search is now on for funding to be able to run a more regular programme of sessions to support mental health and wellbeing. Findings from the sessions were also shared in our paper for the SEN Climate Change Conference, and explored how the baseline for Climate Change education and change can be led by people with Profound and Multiple Learning Disabilities and embodied approaches to the environment.



Mignard and the National Gallery Masterpiece Tour @ South Shields Museum & Art Gallery | August 2026
We were invited to participate again in the National Gallery's continuing Masterpiece Tour at South Shields Museum and Art Gallery, this time with Pierre Mignard's huge Baroque painting The Marquise De Seignelay as the inspiration. We developed an installation - The Cabinet of Curiosities - 
offering visitors an immersive space to smell, taste, wear, and play with fabrics, objects, and environmental elements in the painting and to bring the sensory poem written by young North Eastern writer, Sophi Su, to life.


Recent Conferences Papers
We presented at:

Oral History Festival, Nottingham Trent University | 4th July 2026
The ball that came back: Expanding oral history through sensory storytelling (90 minute interactive workshop)

GEM Annual Conference, Bletchley Park | 9th - 11th September 2026
Paper Title: Digital is the Cipher. The Body is the Key | Embodied Sensory Heritage in a Digital Learning Landscape

SEN Climate Change Conference | September 18th 2026
Paper Title: The Body as Climate Knowledge: Sensory and Embodied Approaches to Environmental Education with People with Learning Disabilities



Publications in Development

In Search of the Sensory Speaker: Testimony, PMLD, and Expanding the Edges of Oral History in Autism and Profound Learning Disabilities: Searching For Inclusion For Society’s Most Marginalised Group, ed. Dr Ned Redmore, Open University, Palgrave Macmillan, Publication 2027

The First Time Travellers: Sensory Testimony, Perpetual Now, and Rethinking Oral History Through the Lives of People with Profound and Multiple Learning Disabilities in The Oral History Handbook, ed. George Severs and Amy Tooth Murphy, Routledge, 2027

Slow Looking, Deep Feeling: Co-produced Multisensory Approaches to Seeing Differently in Learning to Look, Looking to Learn: The Power of Observation in Educational Settings, ed. Dr Susan Barahal, Dr Elizabeth Canter and Dr Brooke Evans, Palgrave Macmillan 2026/7



Inclusive Sensory Resources for the CBA Festival of Archaeology | February 2026
Back in 2024, we were commissioned by Discover Bucks Museum to create a sensory storytelling day for their summer programme. Given free rein, we chose the extraordinary story of the Lenborough Hoard — over 5,000 Anglo-Saxon coins discovered in a Buckinghamshire field by local detectorists.

That original session has now evolved into two free digital resources for the Council for British Archaeology’s 2026 Festival of Archaeology.

This year’s Festival theme is Archaeology and Nature. Our contributions respond with embodied, accessible approaches to discovery:

• The Detectorists Sensology — a Flo Longhorn-inspired Sensology Workout set to the theme tune of the BBC’s The Detectorists, inviting participants to become “Sensory Archaeologists” through music, movement, touch and play.
• The Lenborough Hoard Sensory Story Template — a flexible storytelling framework designed to help museums, historic sites, and community archaeologists adapt the approach to their own digs and finds.

Both resources are designed using a Sensory Heritage methodology that centres people with profound and multiple learning disabilities first, layering access outward so that everyone can participate meaningfully.

Suitable for super-sensory people of every kind — from Early Years to adults.

Download the Sensology here. Sensory Story available soon.

Announcement | Keynote & Resource Launch @ National Access in Museums Conference | Coming in April 2026
Tickets for the National Access in Museums Conference are now live here. Julia will be the Friday keynote introducing the Sensory Heritage methodology and foundational research through an interactive, playful sensory story session featuring giant yellow balls!

The session will also launch the More Than A Nice Walk toolkit and journey planner for museums, galleries, and beyond. This is an open-access resource supporting heritage and cultural sites to explore everyday opportunities to include people with Profound & Multiple Learning Disabilities (PMLD) moving beyond specialist and infrequent programming. More Than A Nice Walk has been co-produced with families of people with PMLD.


Announcement | The Scale Of The Spectrum ed. Joanna Grace | Publishing in April 2026

Joanna Grace's newest book, The Scale Of The Spectrum is coming very soon, featuring a chapter based on Julia's experiences. You can preorder here. This book draws on personal stories and insights from autistic people with high and low support needs to present these individuals as equally capable of offering useful and relevant insights, and by doing so argues against the dividing up of some autistic groups from others. With a foreword by Kieran Rose, author of Autistic Masking.

Every Body Was Welcome @ MK Gallery | Feb 2026
Commissioned to coincide with MK Gallery’s exhibition An Arc From The Eye, exploring the work of Euan Uglow, Every Body Was Welcome reimagined the gallery’s sensory offer through the lens of embodiment and access.

Acknowledging that encounters with the nude form can feel complex or challenging across ages and experiences, we undertook creative research with adults with learning disabilities and young people with visual impairment to shape an inclusive response.

The project generated an original song, a co-created self-led sensory tour designed by young people with visual impairment, tactile café resources inviting informal exploration, and a reframed public sensory tour programme. Rather than focusing solely on individual artworks, the tours explored what it means to be a body in the gallery space — looking, being seen, choosing, and responding.

Creative development incorporated tactile anatomical models, Rosie Haine’s Tate-published storybook It Isn’t Rude To Be Nude, and trauma-informed, embodied facilitation techniques.

Every Body Was Welcome launched at the exhibition private view on 13 February 2026 and runs until 31 May 2026.

Monet and the National Gallery Masterpiece Tour @ South Shields Museum & Art Gallery | Jan 2026
In partnership with South Shields Museum & Art Gallery, we co-created an immersive sensory installation to accompany the tour of Monet’s Petit Bras of the Seine at Argenteuil as part of the National Gallery Masterpiece Tour.

The work followed two intensive on-site co-creation days with nearly 100 community participants, including children and adults with learning disabilities. Drawing on Monet’s materials, palette and working process, we developed a hands-on sensory play kit rooted in a collaboratively written sensory poem and structured prompts generated with participants.

Alongside the installation, we produced a free digital teaching pack to support outreach and classroom engagement. The pack includes the co-created sensory story, guidance on low-cost and no-cost resource-making, a Massage Story, the Foley Story created by Ruth Sullivan, and extension activities spanning art-making, horticulture, sensology and cooking.

The full teaching pack is available to download below, alongside the pack we created in 2023 for Constable's The Cornfield.