“Touch is now more charged 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.
© 2021 Dorothy Hodgkin's Hands, 1978. Sarah Mercer. Reproduced by permission of the Henry Moore Foundation
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
© 2021 The Artist's Hands, c.1974. Henry Moore Archive. Reproduced by permission of the Henry Moore Foundation