July 2026 - I had been contemplating the attention we give, or, more like don’t give, to objects and things we see everyday. With beautiful morning light I woke and decided to give my hands ten minutes of attention. Then I received a juried art call called Microcosm - and this is where it led me:
They Were Mine All Along
For decades my hands seemed to belong to someone older than me. It was only with time and attention did I realize they had been mine all along.
Beginning with an enlarged fragment of a photo, each page expands the field of view until an entire pair of hands are revealed. What first resembles an aerial landscape, flora, or solar system gradually becomes unmistakably human.
To honor my art practice, the hand-constructed work asks the viewer to slow down and turn each interleaved translucent and watercolor paper page. Subsequent black-and-white images offer only a slightly wider perspective, suggesting that recognition is not the result of seeing more at once, but of giving sustained attention to what has always been present.
They Were Mine All Along is less about aging than about recognition. The work explores time, and the quiet moment when the body we carry finally matches the truth within. Sometimes what has always belonged to us cannot be recognized until we have lived long enough to see it.
The all black & white photography and contemporary artist’s book contains nine pages of images, finalizing on inside back cover with the artist statement. It begins with an enlarged microscopic section of the final image. The next page is that same image but scaled at the size of the actual image it represents. Each subsequent image is an enlarged portion until the viewer reaches the final image detailing my hands. I had considered using just the enlarged microscopic image and final image, but with the pages in between having apertures increasing in size - but I really like the slow pace that a viewer has with both the page image itself and the interleaved vellum papers. Makes you slow down - which is exactly what I had been thinking about. Also, while I like apertures, it felt like a gimmick when the work subject is classic.