Hands up

Aye! it's been a while since I've been in here.

Doesn't mean I haven't been working though heh heh. Just that life's intervened again.

This body of work is gently coming to a close now. I've made 3 large sign drawings in all... since posting the 'birds' one. Each one is different and has a different feel.
The poems still move me and I hope I've done them justice - I chose a phrase from the poem titled 'The manual alphabet'; it talks about 'trees signing in the storm' ... such a stunning concept I think. Sarah's face is very expressive and so this one is less about hands and more about faces - it looks like she's calling up a storm.

Then there's a line from 'The hand as nest' - it goes ' you choose a fruit the size and shape of a heart'. So that's the last big drawing. I'm not so sure about this one - it seems a little 'bitty' in terms of the composition. (I'll borrow Ricky' camera and post up some terrible pics soon).

But then... I decided to move the idea of nesting hands along a bit and I'm experimenting with papier maché using silk paper and twisted ropes of tissue paper to make little 'finger bowls' (yeah cute huh?!) which I'm going to line with hands drawings - like fragile nests - or gifts that you give (which after all is another form of expressing a feeling or speaking to someone without words). I want them to be fragile - and quite deconstructed.

Here's the poems in case you're interested.

The Manual Alphabet

Sculpts. Just look at these neighbours. Who sees with the fingers
sees these things together. I once built a neighbour of light.
We used to read by his skin, the whole town, reciting "Repeat after

until we could decipher branches signing in the storm and
long past the fields now speaking, walking on his hands out of town.

Cole Swensen


The Hand as Nest

What caress?
and who
of slate who made
this flute, you

hollow out a bone with a smaller bone.

You choose a fruit the size and shape of a heart.

Cole Swensen