Talitha Kennedys 2019 series

My hand to make a hand are hand-stitched black leather soft-sculptures loosely based on the gestures of the hand. The works have been spurred by her neurotic reverie as to what it means to create as a creator, resulting in work about the hand that makes things that are a hand-like things.Talitha relates to leather as flesh like her own flesh so by re-animating industrialised dead animal skin suggesting her existence as possibly one with the natural world - animal, plant and landscape. All these things can be known by touching it and reversibly they come into being by being touched by the toucher. The corporeal qualities of sculpture allows an encounter with the observed world to be transformed into creatures to engage with tactility and visibly as a substitute holdable object. Kennedy is interested in our cultural failure to know ourselves as part of the natural environment and she makes comfort devices for this separation anxiety.

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