“What is unique about touch, when set against the other senses, is its mutuality.
While we can look without being looked back at,
We can’t touch without being touched in return.
Touch is the first sense to develop,
and is mediated by the skin, our largest organ.” – Daniel Miller, anthropologist
You are invited to touch, hold, caress, press, feel the different softness and temperatures of the Touching Tools.
The tactile characters of the Touching Tools vary in their materiality: the warmth of wood, the fleshy resistance of foam, the cool and smooth surface of unfired clay leave different sensory memories in the palm. Engaging with them, your touch can lead you to moments of tactile awareness.
The round shapes came about through an embodied making process: by swaddling clay, mimicking a mothering practice, it curled into shape through its own weight and the holding force of the wrap. Touching Matter proposes the potential of a touch-forward culture by bringing tactile awareness in our relations with the material world and ultimately with each other.
BIO
Dóra Léhy, graduated from the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague.Her narratives unfold personal accounts, curious observations of social dynamics and human behaviour embedded in the material world. She seeks broadened potential of matter through her material research embracing its sometimes overlooked inherent characteristics.Her work offers gentle encounters with matter through utopian imagination and intimacy.
This project is realized as part of “The Body is a Movement”, a project by Onomatopee and Baltan Laboratories.
During Design Week Public Program, Onomatopee and Baltan Laboratories will present the project with a talk on rethinking the importance of the body (and corporeity) in the contemporary cult of hyper-productivity.