You Need Hands....

Well here we all are again. Last time we looked at my core image that I want to use as a base camp. As a reminder it's this:

For reasons I'm not entirely sure about the part of the image which has attracted most of my attention in the initial stages of this project has been the hands. I've been all about the hands for the last few weeks - and hands freak me out. Scare the bejeebus out of me. I really don't like hands. Particularly if they're not attached to a body. The only reasoning I have for you is that in this context I view them as healing hands. Benevolent rather than malevolent. And I've had some quite nasty issues with my own hands in the last few months. In short, because of the Rheumatoid Arthritis they haven't really been working that well. So hands have been a bit of an obsession.

By all accounts that's o.k. because this period before the formal proposal submission is all about experimentation so I've been playing with hands in the hope that they'll push me towards some sort of resolution.

These are my hands. It's pretty difficult to draw and observe your own hands at the same time. Also, I need to use way more moisturiser...

My textiles tutor photocopied her hands to give me something else to work from and she created a bit of a monster. Her hands are everywhere in my work right now. I reckon I'm going to have to pay her a royalty. I made loads of hand collages.

I even made a film with them:

I like the 3D quality of the photocopies but the negatives left behind after I cut them out intrigued me too. They seem more political and remind me of the white painted hands a lot of people used to hold up in demos against ETA in Spain. They would shout the slogan 'Our hands are clean' as a reaction to the latest senseless murder and I remember finding the whole thing emotionally very compelling.

It's very easy to imagine separate lives and identities for these negatives because they don't really have any other identifying quality than their shape. With that in mind, I showed them to colleagues and asked them to tell me what sort of hand their's was - a poet's hand, an artist's hand etc. - which garnered some fascinating answers that I hope to incorporate into my work somehow.

I must admit to feeling slightly stressed by the lack of actual direction or messaging in my work at the moment but apparently that's how it's supposed to be. It's meant to drive me towards a resolution that is less predictable than my work has been in the past. In the meantime I'm definitely grinding my teeth much more than is absolutely necessary. The sacrifices we make in the name of art. I'm sure my dentist will be grateful.