The Hands Project
Archeological objects are almost always illustrated alone, uncontextualized, and separated from the living world of people and objects. It is a technique that draws from representational standards of scientific practice, and facilitates the comparative study of objects. Still, this displacement does not always serve a more modern archeological practice that focuses on the experience of objects as much as their shape.
The hands project seeks to explore a different approach to object visualization. By including the outlines of modern human hands, the representations of archeological objects represented here attempt to re-center the archeological object back into modern social worlds. Not only does this technique offer a more intuitive sense of object scale, it also allows for deeper explorations of object life history, the differences between past and present humans, the value of diversity in archeological representations, and the ways that archeological objects are still very much tangled up in modern lives and relationships.
Arrowhead, collected by a White Illinois resident at the turn of the century and kept as a family heirloom. It is shown held in the hands of its current owner, the 90-year-old son (or possibly grandson) of the original collector. The retention of Native American artifacts as family heirlooms for settlers has a long and difficult history. Family memory, national mythology, and colonial atrocity all mingle in these objects and are as much a part of their archeological value as their shape and age.
Clip-on heirloom costume earring, inherited by the current owner as a child from an elderly relative in the mid 1990s. The earring is illustrated in the hand of a woman in her early 80s (left), the hand of a child age 5 (center), and in the hand of the current owner in her late 20s (right). These hands are used to present a reconstruction of the object biography of the earring as an heirloom: passing from an older woman to a child and then retained into adulthood. Objects may remain more stable over time than human bodies, but our experience them nevertheless changes over time. Some things persist as we grow around them, some things weather over time and decay alongside us. How we come to understand objects relate to the way they interact with time, and how we interact with time too.
Small scraper and pebble tool from the Hunterian Museum Collection, illustrated in the hands of the illustrator. This original illustration was produced to explore an embodied sense of size and to attempt to bring the archeologist more explicitly into the representation of an object. Particularly with archeological illustration, images of objects are frequently produced with little to no credit to the original illustrator. This image attempts to bring the subjective experience of the illustrator into the illustration itself.