THINKING HANDS is a group exhibition in the Stala Contemporary Art Gallery upstairs Project Space featuring Sue Leeming, Kay Wood, Dr Leonie Mansbridge, Antonia Radich, Johanna Valom.

The current global networked culture (that puts so much emphasis on the visual/virtual) gives rise to a situation where the mind and the body have become detached and ultimately disconnected. End products are pre-determined, by what Timothy Morton calls “hyperobjects” - entities of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that they defeat traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place.

This exhibition focuses on the nexus between self and work as one that is dialogic and corporeal – a visceral and gestural call and response as form emerges due to the dialogue between each subject and the object(s) of their attention.

The concerns for the loss of the importance of the sensory, begun in his classic work The Eyes of The Skin are extended in Juhani Pallasmaa’s The Thinking Hand, where he reveals the miraculous potential of the human hand. The hand and what it holds (be it brush, pencil, dirt, hammer or needle) becomes the bridge between the imagining mind and the emerging image/object. The book surveys the multiple essences of the hand, its biological evolution and its role in the shaping of culture, highlighting how the hand–tool union and eye–hand–mind fusion are essential for dexterity and how ultimately the body and the senses play a crucial role in memory and creative work.

The impetus behind this exhibition was to focus on the communicative energy between maker and materiality, where the hand may be called by, and communicated to, from materiality, in a conversation that is embracing, unpredictable, and continually evolving.

Kay Wood