My hands are anything but small. I paused my typing just now to take a look at them, turn them over and over again in front of me, observing them in equal parts intrigue and disgust as I often do. I have hated my hands for a long time. Big palms, long and spindly fingers like my father’s, protruding knuckles, awkward man hands.
But I read an article last year, from which my titular quote has been pulled. It was an interview with Nicole Farhi - one of my favourite designers way back when I was a fashion obsessed teen - that told of her quite literally selling her name (the eponymous fashion label) to become a full time sculptor. The focus of her second solo exhibition in 2016? ‘The Human Hand’.
The hands of artists, the hands of friends, of creators, of professionals whose crafts have long been lauded in the cultural realm. Farhi says in the piece: “I really enjoy doing just the limb. I think it’s fantastic to concentrate on just one thing. It’s small, but means so much”. The interviewer then goes on to talk about the hand as a means of conveying connection – a strange sort of plainsighted intimacy, revealing secret things that the face has evolved to become so adept at hiding – and, in the end, becoming something larger than life itself.
I used to be a contradictory mixture of avid and lazy when I was at the first peak of my own creativity. A-Level Art and English Literature were an absolute drag and you can be sure I did the bare minimum I needed to scrape those A grades. Yet somehow I always found the energy to stay up into the small hours on school nights, writing blog posts, poems, stories, making videos (I don’t care what anyone says, I will forever be proud of this one), taking and editing photos, doodling and sometimes even painting or sculpting with stuff I’d stolen from Ms Smetana’s cupboards. I did this all not for school, but for me, and for you.
It’s like the perfectionism that bound my hands during the working day melted away in those dark and quiet hours. Those overgrown limbs were transformed into an extension of my inner self (whoever she was) while the yellow of my bedroom light burned bright & alone in our pitch black home. I could speak my subconscious and otherwise inarticulable language through those hands. I had found a thing that brought me deep joys, such that I could not begin to explain.
It makes me so sad to see how I slowly fell away from all this over the years. I went to uni and the mounting Responsibility of Impending Adulthood began to make its presence felt to the point of being overbearing. I quit my usual 3am creative rituals and let fear and stress take their place in the form of overdue essays. My hands rarely uncurled from their fists from then. Until an old memory struck me hard between the eyes. . .
A priest blessed our hands in a mass we had at secondary school, it was to celebrate growing up & getting out there I guess. I doubt anyone else will remember this, but whenever I look at my hands now (as I often do) and feel once again compelled to hate them, I remember that they are physically blessed. Marked out for the work that they love to do & do so well.
Clawing and feeling my way back to my creativity has come at a time when I'm starting to love my hands and what they once did, and still could do, for me. Some months it will feel hard to trust that these hands are beautiful and worthy of begetting beauty despite all outward appearances. Some days it will feel as easy as my mother braiding my sisters’ hair on a Saturday night. And these are the small things to me, but, oh, do they mean so very much.
