prelude

|||| / HANDS

New hand-work project at Kibera Girls School Soccer Academy • Kenya • 2021 • photo credit | Katy Troyer \||||

This is about hands.

They make. They give. They receive. They give again. Rework, replay and recreate. Refine.

In turn, hands create a cycle of life. Touching the tree, the rock, the earth, hands discover. Then they experiment to invent and innovate and acknowledge life. 

Our hands cultivate relationships within the world we live: people we know and are getting to know, creatures great and small—sometimes whom we don’t even know, and all manner of things, animate and inanimate. 

Hands simplify, symbolize, activate, adapt and repair a host of complexities: trust, peace, humility, love, respect, beauty.

Different kinds of hands offer us possibilities and grant opportunities. Yet only in correlation with our environment, our communities, and in conjunction with other senses and sensibilities: sound, smell, sight and taste.

All of us rely on a hand—and sometimes foot, feet or toes—for the better.