You don’t raise your hand and there is
some essential beauty in your fingers
from “The Hand”, Mary Ruefle
As is often the case, my partner and I spent Saturday night and early Sunday morning playing music at each other. We use a battle type scenario and it’s quick fire – one of us plays a song, whilst the other scrabbles to find a musical reply to it. For some reason a lot of our choices over the weekend were cover versions and remixes. Why am I mentioning this? Because I think the collaboration I’m doing with painter Iain Andrews might have to take that kind of approach. His paintings “begin as a dialogue with an image from art history – a painting by an Old Master that may then be re-arranged or used as a starting point from which to playfully but reverently deviate” and my solo work “usually begins with a perplexing idea and an existing object through which this puzzle can be illuminated” and so, we are both interested in re-arrangement and transformation, which is a great starting point for a joint project. However, it strikes me that apart from this, what we have in common is actually far more fundamental: it’s the way we use our hands. He paints, I cut – the fact that we each work “by hand” is not just a working method, but something more akin to a need. For me, this comes from wanting each cut to be unique: I could use machinery to do a lot of my work for me, but I don’t. I want to be as much a part of the work as I can be. I don’t yet have Iain’s point of view on this, but I imagine that from the kinds of marks he makes, he has a parallel sense of physicality (probably even more so, given the fluidity of paint and how much more difficult it must be to work with as compared to paper). So I seem to be thinking about hands as the site where thought turns into action and hands as symbols of collaboration, connection, comradeship… hmmmm….
