My Hand in Yours

<p dir="ltr">Background</p><p dir="ltr">This multi-disciplinary art project draws upon the history of sculpture and touch alongside socially engaged art practices, the serial object and photography. It draws on the history of small hand-held objects such as early Venus amulets and contemporary jewellery practice as an embodiment of social and material connections. These works are influenced by research into embodiment that traces a lineage from phenomenologists Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger to work in cognitive science and embodiment such as enactivism (Noe, 2004) and sensorimotor empathy (Chemero 2016). The relational in art is considered from Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics (1998) to Clare Bisshop’s Artificial Hells (2012) and Pablo Helguera’s Education for Socially Engaged Art (2011). The project critiques art as commodification by gifting the art and using it as a social utility to create active and embodied relations between the artist and audience.</p><p dir="ltr">Contribution</p><p dir="ltr">‘My Hand in Yours’ was a socially engaged project that aimed to create connectedness through touch. It involved the creation and gifting of 40 small, cast bronze sculptures of the artist’s hand and documentation of the exchange between artist and audience. The work aimed to create social and material connections between artist and audience and break down the material hegemony of bronze as a semi—precious metal and a symbol of power in the public realm – particularly as figurative sculpture. By gifting these small biomorphic objects, the artist distributed and atomised this power endowing the recipient with an active and embodied experience. This project was conducted outside traditional gallery settings, serving as a critique of those institutional systems. It was documented and shared on social media. </p><p dir="ltr">Significance</p><p dir="ltr">This work was included in the 2024 festival Radiant Pavilion – Naarm/Melbourne Contemporary Jewellery and Object Biennial through a competitive and peer reviewed process. Forty people took part in the project and received their own hand cast bronze. This process was documented with simple photographs then uploaded to Instagram (@fleursummers). There were 40 social media posts consisting of a total of 200 photographs documenting the process over six months. This project garnered considerable interest with some of these posts receiving over 1000 views.</p><p dir="ltr"><br></p>