ed than it was when the idea for
this exhibition was dreamt up in 2019”, said artist and writer
Edmund de Waal during an interview on BBC Radio 4 Today
programme on May 19, 2021. “We have gone from wanting
to touch things to needing desperately to touch.” At a
studio briefing in February 2020, a month before This Living
Hand—the exhibition curated by de Waal—was scheduled
to open, few could have imagined how dramatically a
nascent viral pandemic would change the world. Opening
after a delay of 14 months, the curatorial focus on the
sculptor Henry Moore’s drawings of hands, the primacy of
touch in experiencing sculpture, and in developing haptic
knowledge, resonates more deeply than anyone could have
anticipated.
Since the pandemic began, our wariness about hands
transmitting the virus, and our adoption of more frequent
and rigorous handwashing and hand sanitisation regimens,
have heightened our consciousness of them. Our own hands
stilled, we were moved by poignant media images of gloved
intensive care staff lifting and tenderly repositioning the
comatose bodies of artificially ventilated patients, and of
old residents in care homes and visiting family members
pressing palms and splayed fingers against windowpanes,
striving to touch by glass proxy.
Moore was interested in how hands function and their
capacity for expressing human emotion. He drew them
throughout his long career, his own hands as well as other
peoples’, and copied earlier artists’ drawings of hands
to comprehend their iconography. Of the 17 drawings
by Moore selected by de Waal for display, five depict the
sculptor’s own hands, including one in which he grasps a
pebble. A drawing of two pairs of hands demonstrates that a
ball of wool is held tightly, whereas a skein is looped loosely
between outstretched hands. Three drawings depict the
arthritic hands of the Nobel Prize winner Dorothy Hodgkin
who, when the Royal Society commissioned Moore to
make her portrait, modestly stipulated that he draw her
hands, which had been responsible for intricate X-ray
crystallography.
Moore amassed a large collection of natural and man-
made objects, selected either on scientific or aesthetic
grounds, as an ‘inventory of forms’, which he handled
frequently to gauge their differing weights, volumes, and
textures. He habitually rearranged them on tables and other
surfaces at his family home and in his adjacent studios,
and was delighted if guests handled and appreciated
them. “My father always had a pebble in his right hand,
and he turned it over with his thumb and his forefinger’,
said Mary Moore, the sculptor’s daughter, during the Today
programme interview with de Waal.“He was internalising
form and I think that surface is the key to form for all of us.”
Representative objects from this collection, selected by
de Waal, are arranged in a large, glazed vitrine. Neither they
nor Moore’s drawings can be touched, although they can
be inspected closely. Unusually within a gallery however, de
Waal invites people to touch three of Moore’s sculptures,
and discern textural differences in their surfaces: Mother and
Child (1978), carved from stalactite stone; and two bronze
casts, Reclining Figure: Hand (1979) and King and Queen
(1952–53, cast 1985). As usual, people can also carefully
touch, but not climb, stand, or sit on 23 of his sculptures,
displayed in the extensive grounds.
In addition to curating the exhibition, de Waal has lent stone
benches of various lengths, and positioned them within the
gallery, to enable people to pause comfortably and reflect
on Moore’s sculptures and objects from his collection. The
benches were carved from Hornton stone to de Waal’s designs.
“The benches are carved and polished so that there are
different textures to discover…” de WaaI is quoted as having
said in a New Art Centre press release issued on July 1, 2020.
“I have called them tacet. Silence, rest.” Especially for the
exhibition, he has created a stone washbasin in the form of
a Japanese tsukabai, supplied with cold running water via an
ingenious arrangement of bamboo pipes. Having already
completed the now customary COVID rite of hand-sanitisation
at the main entrance, visitors can pause at the basin and
ritually cleanse their hands before entering the exhibition.
“My father was extremely tactile, and I think that pre-
eminently he understood that touch has a deep psychological
and emotional content”, said Mary Moore. “He knew how to
convey in his sculpture that touch is instinctive.” Regarding
haptic knowledge, Moore has described his realisation,
while modelling the back of a mature woman (Seated Figure,
1957), that he was unconsciously reproducing the shape
of his own mother’s back which, in his boyhood winters,
she had often asked him to massage with liniment, to ease
her rheumatic pain.
Colin Martin
Exhibition
Sculpture and haptic deficit in the time of COVID-19
Dorothy Hodgkin’s Hands, 1978. Sarah Mercer.
Reproduced by permission of the Henry Moore Foundation
Published Online
September 8, 2021
https://doi.org/10.1016/
S1474-4422(21)00299-4
This Living Hand: Edmund de Waal
presents Henry Moore
Henry Moore Studios & Gardens,
Perry Green, Much Hadham,
Hertfordshire, UK
May 19 to Oct 31, 2021
www.henry-moore.org/visit/
henry-moore-studios-gardens
The Artist’s Hands, c.1974. Henry Moore Archive.
