Touch Project

Gentle Touch
6000 x 4000 pixels
Photograph

"Any first-time touch, or change in touch (from gentle to stinging, say), sends the brain into a flurry of activity. Any continuous low-level touch becomes background."
 -Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses

This work shows the way a touch can meld into the background of one's senses, the sense almost being turned off in a specific spot to the point it is not noticed. The hand does not notice the bug resting upon it, the creature is too small and still to attract continued attention to the skin it rests on, so its minuscule weight is tuned out as non-essential noise.

Weight
6000 x 4000 Pixels
Photograph

"Although there’s no special name for the ability, we can touch something and decide if it’s heavy, light, gaseous, soft, hard, liquid, solid"
-Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses

This photograph gives the immediate sensation of weight. Our sense of touch is so keen and so aware of all the data it has ever collected that without holding an object in our hands, we can "feel" its weight. The tools look heavy to us, not because there is an inherent "heavy" look that some objects may or may not possess, but because we recognize them as things we have held which contain some considerable mass that has been burned into our senses.