Touch
Legnica Art Gallery, Poland

I designed these pieces by using pictograms to tell a story from our near past and present,

a story also about 'touch'.

Until recently, we took for granted the privilege to touch and be touched by those we love and who love us back. The Covid-19 pandemic showed us otherwise. Torn away from that privilege, and even from the privilege to share the same space, we began touching virtually through computer screens and windows.

 

Yet we continued to seek the warmth and texture of touch. If we were allowed to be in the same space, we reinvented contact by means of gloves, a contact that was both a touch and not a touch, at least approximating touch. We borrowed the blue surgical glove and made it a global symbol of this new kind of touching. The glove also became a symbol of hope, whose very wearing would make it unnecessary one day. 

 

My first entry for the touch open-call is 'Hand in hand - gloved'; expresses that hope, hope for the innocence of holding hands without care again.

My second entry 'Hand in hand' represents that imagined future in a more abstracted form.