Bodies are not only the haptic recipients of touch but are also the site of its lived experience, emotional states and memories; so for visual artists are filled with potential for meaning and metaphor for contemporary life.
What is Touch but an opportunity for an artist to describe human contact at its most elemental? Touch is our very first human sensation, and it is bodily. A touch can be bold or hesitant, vigorous or gentle. Touch is warmth, and we seek it out but it can also be cold, triggering fear or revulsion. Touch is anything from an accidental brush to a full embrace, and at the other extreme, unwanted physical contact. To say of someone that they are touched suggests there is something unhinged and elemental in their being, a state of mind somewhere between mild eccentricity and madness. Indeed, being touched not only describes a physical sensation, it also describes an emotional affect, as when we are touched by a gesture. Then again, to touch can mean to ask for a loan or a favour from someone. In common, at the kernel of almost every meaning, is that touch affects us by exposing us to greater vulnerability and fragility. In other words, touch puts us at risk.
Touch is not an exhibition with a strict curatorial premise but an assembly of 21 artists invited to create or present works that describe touch in any way, in an expansion upon the previous year’s founding exhibition. The artists of Touch describe, suggest, confront and depict the sensation of touch in a variety of ways, yet all works are connected in some way to the sentient body. For them this body could be their own body, or touch, or it could be the body of a subject, the gendered body, or even the communal body of shared human experience. Bodies are not only the haptic recipients of touch but are also the site of its lived experience, emotional states and memories; so for visual artists are filled with potential for meaning and metaphor for contemporary life.
Written by Lisa Sharp
What is Touch but an opportunity for an artist to describe human contact at its most elemental? Touch is our very first human sensation, and it is bodily. A touch can be bold or hesitant, vigorous or gentle. Touch is warmth, and we seek it out but it can also be cold, triggering fear or revulsion. Touch is anything from an accidental brush to a full embrace, and at the other extreme, unwanted physical contact. To say of someone that they are touched suggests there is something unhinged and elemental in their being, a state of mind somewhere between mild eccentricity and madness. Indeed, being touched not only describes a physical sensation, it also describes an emotional affect, as when we are touched by a gesture. Then again, to touch can mean to ask for a loan or a favour from someone. In common, at the kernel of almost every meaning, is that touch affects us by exposing us to greater vulnerability and fragility. In other words, touch puts us at risk.
Touch is not an exhibition with a strict curatorial premise but an assembly of 21 artists invited to create or present works that describe touch in any way, in an expansion upon the previous year’s founding exhibition. The artists of Touch describe, suggest, confront and depict the sensation of touch in a variety of ways, yet all works are connected in some way to the sentient body. For them this body could be their own body, or touch, or it could be the body of a subject, the gendered body, or even the communal body of shared human experience. Bodies are not only the haptic recipients of touch but are also the site of its lived experience, emotional states and memories; so for visual artists are filled with potential for meaning and metaphor for contemporary life.
Written by Lisa Sharp
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