I find hands fascinating. They reveal a person’s life, disposition and personality far more than most other characteristic human features. Not only does this idea regard practices such as palmistry, or gestures and body language, but also the definitions and environmental damage scattered upon the surface of the hand. And, combined with my ongoing interest in psychopathology, my research led me to explore how people express their mentality and its repercussions through their bodies – in particular their hands. I studied mental illnesses such as bulimia, examining the ways in which people strive to be in control: by dominating their bodies those suffering with this illness often regain control of their emotions. Thus, the mind and body are merged in ways both physical and psychological, and the binge/purge practices associated with bulimia have hand/bodily connotations.

Inspired aesthetically by artists such as Ernesto Neto, I wanted to find something which can represent the metaphorically viscid emotional substance that is the constant need to be in control. I wished to symbolise the ways we as people can manipulate and strive to change situations physically, but their emotional effects are what firmly stick upon us. Using putty (a gummy, yet easily manipulated, stretched and altered material) I decided to present this concept visually.

In the arrangement of a series, the downwards transition embodies the potentially convoluted cycle of this mental illness: the perception of being in control, to its inevitable emotional effects. Control may be obtained in one moment, having a hold of the emotional instability and situation in hand (the putty), but in the next moment it elongates into something impossible to disperse, diminish and handle.