touch don’t touch

‘Touch don’t touch’ is a collection created for Nuda Vita 2020. Building on the idea of the corset being a tool of both constriction and manipulation I wanted to bring the work back to the idea of the naked body in close proximity to the object, be it the corset or the feather sculptures I create. Questions are frequently being asked about what it means to be human and how our humanity is changing, our connect or disconnect with nature and also with each other. 

In our too fast-paced existence, fuelled by technology, politics, the climate and the pressures of modern society, have we become distracted or disrupted from being human? There is a sense of division over issues in the world that is also echoed in a sense of lack of control and in our ability to form meaningful relationships.  There are boundaries in place in society to avoid touch, touch makes us human and we are becoming less tactile through fear of being misunderstood. We long to touch and be touched yet have built up defences to ensure those boundaries are kept firmly in place, to keep others at bay.  Desire to connect beyond a sense of disconnect, to rediscover the human, the naked body, to seek out connection that is visceral, corporeal and sensual. A need to reunite, to reverse the disruption of the human and override the detachment that is damaging us. The work explores notions of a defensive embrace, these polar opposites consider what is too fragile to touch, too beautiful, too unobtainable. To touch is to destroy, the desire for ‘the human touch’ may ultimately be the ‘touch of death’.

Jan 2020

The above text was written to accompany the cancelled Munich ‘Nuda Vita’  in 2020 and was written a couple of months before the global pandemic and lockdown rules. Reading this now, a year later and viewing my images that convey people embracing and repelling touch, being protected or restricted by layers of plastic, I get an uneasy sense of what followed. To look at this project now is impossible without a sense of irony and the unforeseen ‘new normal’ that was about to unfold. The fact we have had our isolation and lack of touch pushed to its absolute human limits leaves this work with an overhanging sense of the uncanny. My initial reasons for looking at the notion of proximity and distance has stemmed from a personal observation or inner feeling, a feeling of being out of contact, isolated, a longing for the tactile. A year later such boundaries that existed before have been magnified to become actual rules of distancing, that fear of touch is now a real not imaginary  threat.  Yet on another level the pandemic has made us reconnect with our humanity, to reflect on what that means and who matters to us. The small stuff has been pushed aside. Freedom over restriction is something we now yearn for and will not take for granted again. The desire to reunite has never been more important, the desire to touch has returned.

 Jan 2021.

photography by Laurentian Miksys, modelled by Jennifer Morgan and Ellen Rehmatulla

with thanks to Wales Arts international for supporting the exhibition in Munich Jewellery Week for 'Nuda vita' curated by Ilaria Ruggiero.

Video created for the 2021 online ‘Nuda Vita’ exhibition at the virtual Munich jewellery week exhibition.
Filmed by Anna Lewis, edited by Tim Stokes, music by Harry Keyworth