Touch Artwork
I’ve been thinking a lot about touch and how we can feel a landscape or a world. How the artwork can be felt and seen with eyes closed. This is similar to the tactile sign language Natsumi showed us. How do you paint a world with touch? The haptic womb very much does this. As I was meditating I started to see a person lying on a bed, the bed was a landscape, the hands could reach out around them as they laid on their back, soft mounds, like you are a giant an you are lying amongst the mountains, wet grass, maybe mini creatures. I imaged a bed in a dark room. I also imaged binaural headphones with a story.
When reading the article by Atsushi Mori about their life. They spoke about how it took a long time for them to understand what fantasy means. As they are blind and death, they interpreted touch as pure truth. For example if they felt a teddy that was a tiger, that tiger is real and the teddy is a tiger.
When Tanny wrote and spoke about her reflections of Mori’s experience of touch. I loved how she translated his thoughts as touch being so real that touch is purity and they the memory of the senses such as touch, smell and taste is a simulation of purity or of your utter truth. For us to create physical artwork I think it needs the ability touched and at times not seen but touched. With eyes closed everything is reality but everything is also an interpretation.