Procession.
Wooden spheres,plastic hands. May 2022.
A sculptural piece consisting of toy plastic hands ( sometimes known as finger hands) attached to wooden spheres.
The hands are almost the only anatomical feature possessed by the spheres. This makes their function ambiguous – are they actually hands, or are they feet?Or even wings?
The ‘creatures’ in the procession are quite unsettling. Their lack of anatomical features other than hands gives them the impression that they are crawling clumsily and blindly forward.
Other artworks in this series feature these objects suspended by thread on a mobile. In these works the hands unmistakably also function as wings. In the natural world the wings of birds and bats have evolved from hands (or front feet, which are what hands have evolved from), so the idea of hands being used as wings is far from far-fetched.
This work is partly inspired by my interest in evolutionary science and the natural world, and partly by my interest in the bizarre and the ambiguous.