In Touch

The act of touching a stranger, a door-knob or even your own face has been forever altered by the pandemic. All manner of touch is fraught with both revulsion and longing.

As the viewer enters the gallery they are surrounded by hands, like a carwash of hands.
Overhead there is the backlit sculptural Arc de Gloved Hands.
Video is projected underfoot onto the floor like a doormat.
Drawings of hands float freely just out of reach overhead, behind Plexiglas.
Ink drawings of hands are inspired as much by the hand of god in art history, as they are by the diagrams posted by every public sink during the pandemic.

Plexiglas is everywhere in our society now, jerry-rigged, as a vain hope to protect the clerk or the professor against the invisible virus. Plexiglass unites the 2D and time-based elements and invokes the pathetic piece of armour that separates you from me . Hopefully, by the time the show is presented there will be surplus plexi to be had!
Once inside the space, projected onto a 4 x 8 sheet of thick frosted plexi is a 5 min loop of videos altogether called “Handwasher’s Prayer”. At the height of the lockdown, these square 1 minute videos were edited feverishly and posted on Instagram the day they were shot. They were a vital link to other artists and my sanity.

With the Arc de Gloved Hands, ink wash drawings fluttering throughout the space and a series of short videos, the viewer is engulfed in the universal need for touch that the pandemic has inflamed.

Arc de Gloved Hands:
an arched grid of thin steel rods (concrete reinforcing mesh) supports all variety of gloves for work and fashion ,
filled with wire, wet plaster, sand, cornstarch

Each glove has it's own story to tell
through
o signs of use
o the gesture:
to reach, to caress, to grip, to offer, to plead, to beg, to molest, to pity, to shrug.