Extending the notion of “footprint” to the hand—as in “handprint”—the multimedia installation Coming to Grips explores how touch shapes our relationship with the material world.

Inspired by Mimosa Pudica, a delicate tropical plant native to Central and South America whose fern-like leaves fold inward when touched, the installation brings together woodfired ceramics, sugar crystals, and carved sculptures presented on rammed earth pedestals. As a study of handles, the works incorporate custom-designed metal grips and support structures that examine gesture, touch, and modes of display.

The exhibition also presents A History of an Object in 100 Years in 180 Seconds, a 16mm film composed from hundreds of images of hands taken from the complete 20th-century archive of National Geographic Magazine. Rather than ordering the photographs chronologically, they are sequenced by focal length and composition, producing an illusion of movement and a filmic rhythm from still images.

Circulating endlessly through mass reproduction, these pictures remain lodged in our collective memory as faint impressions—like afterimages. A History of an Object in 100 Years in 180 Seconds traces a century of objects “passing hands,” while reflecting on National Geographic’s history of voyeurism and its ethnographic fascination with “exotic” artifacts presented for Western consumption.

Together, these works remind us that touch—in all its forms, from a grasp to a pinch—is an embodied language through which we know the world, and through which the world knows us.