Isabel Jones is a sound artist, singer/physical performer, and yogini. In 1989 she co-founded Salamanda Tandem and as artistic director she brings together sensory experts, dancers, sculptors, poets, filmmakers, composers, and writers, to research, redefine and establish creative dialogue between people and art forms. Isabel grew up steeped in the politics of disability, witnessing how her father Lewis, who was deafblind, became disabled by the world and by people around him. Bemused by passers by who put money in Lewis’ hand, the family were hit by the poverty and disempowerment that comes with disability, right across, health, education, social care and the arts. First, as frustrated witness and later as artist/activist, Isabel began a life long journey of collaboration with Lewis, and other artist collaborators to investigate how artistic processes could open up the deepest forms of human creativity without ‘disabling’ people. Using ground up processes, sound, movement, touch and the senses to find an artistic language, where people could expand through artistic collaboration, Isabel devised and directed more than 83 public performance art works, and many intimate or smaller scale works produced with people, institutions and public buildings of all kinds. Salamanda Tandem have received financial support from Arts Council England for 26 years. Several thousand participants have enriched salamanda tandem’s practice, supporting the (as yet) unrealised ambition for attitudinal change.

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