Research note 3: Give Me Your Hand

The palm of my right hand was cast last week, along with those of other visitors at an open studio event at FORM-ICA in Bath. The artist who cast it told me she was making a piece of work about how every hand is different, unique to the person.

When I look at the photographs I took of my cast, sometimes I cannot see my hand at all. My brain tricks me and all I see are lumps of plaster. The image becomes a kind of mountainous landscape: ridges, hollows, valleys, marks left by pressure and time.

Then I look again and, suddenly, the hand returns. I can see the fingers, the palm, the deep lines running through the centre of it. Lines that are meant to tell you something about the life you have lived, or predict something of the life you have left to live — or so I’m told. If only I knew how to read them.

My right thumb has always been a little different. I injured it when I was around five years old and severed the tendon, so it does not bend properly, although it is not broken. It is simply part of my hand now, part of its history. A small physical fact that has travelled with me all my life.

Looking at this plaster cast, I found myself thinking about hands as evidence. Hands touch, hold, make, carry, remember. They can be read as intimate records of a life, but they are also full of symbols and inherited meanings.

The Red Hand of Ulster came back to me too: the severed hand thrown ashore in order to claim land, belonging, kingship. A hand detached from the body, turned into proof. A gesture of desire and violence at once.

It is a brutal image, but also a strangely familiar one: the hand as claim, the hand as sacrifice, the hand as mark.

Perhaps that is what moved me about seeing my own palm turned into plaster. It was my hand, but not quite my hand, it was the valley of my palm. A cast, a trace, a small white landscape of a body I know from the inside but dont recognise it as I see it it detached from me in this copy.

Give me your hand.

Tabhair dom do lámh.