Touch & Feelings

65cm x 45cm x 32 cm

 

Description

Dark oak sewing table, beige velvet lined top compartment containing shapes/lumps made from printed silk & cotton fabrics, overprinted with thermo-chromic ink that becomes transparent when touched, revealing the colours & patterns underneath the dark grey layer. Various stuffings: sea grass, wool (raw & carded), packaging felt, shredded paper, plastic bags, straw, polystyrene beads, polyester, bay leaves, capok.

Bottom drawer lined with printed linen containing pebbles covered in fabrics.

 

Themes, Comments and Storylines

Impressions left by touch. Hands-on experience of the power of touch to affect change. Transformations. The relationship between touch & feeling.

 

“I am about six years old and my father has gone on early shift, so I creep into my mother's bed and put my arms around her. She is soft and plump and her nightdress was celanese. I can feel the texture of it in my head even now. I loved my mother and we would have little chats when she awoke.”

 

Source: BBC Radio 4 Memory Experience

 

“ … the Wunderschrank belongs among such performative devices full of secrets and surprises. The ornamentally charged, yet relatively impassive exterior presents an enigma drawing the traveller toward unchartered country. To access the colourful eyecatchers stored behind the cabinet’s physiognomically elusive and sombre surfaces, the visitor had to embark on a voyage of tactile exploration, feeling her way into a locked-away terrain of unfamiliar and familiar substances.” (Stafford 2001, p.12)

 

 

 “… the viewer shifts among the sacred, the secular, the moral, and the natural…cabinet is also a virtuoso synesthetic device. It prompts and involuntary and non-linguistic joining in which the real information in one sense is accompanied by a perception in another sense.” (Stafford 2001, p.14)

 

“Imagine the startling slippages in the sensory register experienced by the original circling observer…” (Stafford 2001, p.14)