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Melbourne-based artist Colin Duncan has developed a series of large works constructed out of sections of braille type, and rendered as a white on white surface. Generated by a Braille printer, with the aid of computer software at the Victorian Institute for the Blind, these subtle works are the result of select photographic images scanned and reproduced in an embossed form. The impact of these fine, raised points, building a gradual body and outline, is necessarily oblique in the sense that the images they reproduce are sensitive to the fluctuations of light and to the movement of the viewer; they may be experienced from the position of both sight and touch, where it is possible to cross from one mode to the other. The proximity of the two modes, of a barely perceptible image and a surface that is receptive to touch, whereby the meaning of the work is 'absorbed', implies a profound intimacy and m this lies the significance of the work. For Colin Duncan the practice of art acts to dissolve the boundaries separating one sense from another and thus introduces a zone that might be best described as polymorphous. While these works lack the differentiation afforded by colour this is not in fact a neutral realm. Once sight ceases to be the single, primary mode of acquiring knowledge, a lucid sense of touch is restored to the realm of epistemology. This affect of an intimate interpretation is particularly evident in the work, Untitled (Cathedral) (1995), which is in part, a tribute to the writer Raymond Carver's short story of the same name. In this brief narrative one of the characters struggles to describe, for a man who