Before words, hands were the language of life.

Hands transmitted the most urgent of communication. “Stop!” “Come over here!” Look over there!” etc.

Greek orators used hand gestures and gesticulations to amplify their rhetorical flare.

Roman emperors could command death or spare life with a simple gesture.

Chirologia, or the Natural Language of the Hand (1644) was John Bulwer’s attempt to record a universal lexicon of hand movements, believing gesture to be the only language fully natural to mankind.

Today, we still can’t quite shake these traditions fully. Body language is a cultural practice with deep roots.











Embedded in hands are stories of life.

Gnarled hands are imprints of a life lived, of labour, sweat, and pain, of inequity and injustice.

Soft, plump hands tell the story of privilege.

The life casts of famous people’s hands, produced by Joseph Edgar Bohm in the 19th century, are a testament to this power. Disembodied and decontextualized, these free-standing forms still bring you eerily close to the original sitter, sensing their aura and vibration, more than a century after their death.

Indeed, portraits of artists often focus on their hands. Here, it’s the hands, not the eyes, that are the gateway to the soul.

Palm-reading offers another form of legibility. An ancient practice that offers a story not of who you are, or who you were, but of who you will become. Always with the risk that death is around the corner. The hand carries the future within it.

In fact, the hand has a unique ability to crystallize an image of death like no other body part, a constant memento mori carried with us every day. When Wilhelm Röntgen made his very first X-ray, which was of his wife’s hand, upon looking at it she proclaimed: “I have seen my death!”

More advanced medical technology tells stories in real time, of biological functions through the hand. During Covid-19 and before widespread at-home tests were available, a finger oxymetre could tell you if your oxygen levels were low – a predictor of the disease, and a premonition of possible death.












Anywhere you look, you cannot avoid traces of the hand.

The vast majority of our material culture is an imprint of the hand. Made by hand. Or made by tools largely conducted with the hand.

The tool and the hand are difficult to separate. It’s hard to define where one starts and the other stops, so deeply entwined is their interaction.

A paintbrush holds ink awaiting its application to a surface. But it’s only through the adept interplay of hand and handle and the intuited sense of the way brush fibers bend and discharge their content, that a work is created and can be judged of its quality.

Looking at the world, and seeing the immense accumulation of things all around you, imagine the orgy of hands and tools that came together to make it all, over weeks, years and centuries. The collective hand; a tacit cabal of limbs constructing new worlds.

The Hand Is a Portrait of Life

The Hand Speaks

Extensions of the Hand

Part 1: The Rise of the Hand

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