…..continued from previous post….
Coincidentally…
This weekend, while Bo is off making and, rumour has it, sewing, using his hands as much as he wants, without even thinking about it, I have been elsewhere, talking about “Getting Our Hands Dirty”
A series of talks at BCU about the importance of physically and metaphorically getting our hands dirty. The timing of this is double edged. I feel resentful that I couldn’t take notes in my usual way, and took to just jabbing key words into my phone… they are pretty much useless, as I look at them now in order to refresh my memory of what went on. This is why I have the need to write this now, before it all slips away out through my ears.
The talk that grabbed me totally undoubtedly because of my accidental/coincidental injury was that by David Prytherch, Senior Research Fellow in Haptics and Human/Computer interaction.
Touch is a hugely significant sense. It is the closest to us. It is the first to arrive, in the foetus, and in cases of extreme senile dementia, the last to leave us. There are things happening in the amazing organ of our skin that are still unknown to us. The transmission of the complexity of information from our skin to our brains is astonishing… we feel texture, temperature, the movement of air, hardness, and minute changes in these factors, immediately. What our skin receives and transmits, our brain translates, find associations with, and relays to our conscious minds. Memory and touch. All artists find the material they have an affinity with, the one that speaks to them, the one they find can speak to others, gives them voice, makes them understood. It doesn’t matter what it is, but we all have it, and we all recognise that affinity in others. It might be wood, metal, paint, clay, chalk, and in my case, textiles. But there is no substitution for it. This is why my plight feels so hard. Other artists recognise this and have expressed huge sympathy and have said things like “oh no. You must be climbing the walls in frustration!” …They get it.
David said that direct engagement with the materials and the tools, the touch is crucial.
As artists our material choices are very important. We enjoy the ability to manipulate the materials that have become our specialism. He said we feel these things in the pit of our stomach, it is “the part of us that purrs”
The part of me that purrs… what a phrase!
We are physical beings and crave touch … However amazing the virtual or the fantasy is, we will ALWAYS crave the real, the physical.
David talked about Intrinsic Haptic Reward- the satisfaction of a repetitive (and not necessarily skillful) physical activity, about its meditative qualities.
What I need to think about now, is how to move my work forward while my tendons repair themselves. I need to touch, to find something to feel and manipulate that can keep my brain going, retain those links to the real world, the real me.
