In Your Hands

About

While the pandemic has brought restrictions to international travel and shipping, there is an ever growing desire to make connections with each other. Touch is very much missed, and In Your Hands invites a dance between continents; a call and response with letters and flowers; an ode to the home we all spend so much time in. A celebration of artists’ networks, for support, sharing and dialogue. Bringing people together to perform, to arrange, to make, and stitch.

Arinda Daphine, a poet and dancer, and civil rights lawyer, in Kampala, Uganda, is devising a new multi-discipline performance-for-camera with Shallal Dance Theatre, who have been celebrating diversity, ability and community in Cornwall for 25 years. Daphine is supported by BLACK* Artists on the Move.

Lenka Clayton + Phillip Andrew Lewis, both based in Pittsburgh, USA, is commissioning the oldest net-maker in the UK, Henry Cowls, still working from a factory in Helston, to make a single net that incorporates every variation of mesh that they produce. One impossible net that theoretically could catch everything, and nothing.

Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, a Canadian artist based in Paris, will send a personal letter each week during the exhibition to a local florist, who will respond with a floral arrangement presented in the gallery – an intimate conversation developing over the summer.

Klaas Rommelaere, a textile artist based in Antwerp, is creating Home; the fabric walls of a room suspended in the gallery, furnished with cross stitched objects, ornaments and patterns. Over 60 people across Cornwall and the UK are stitching the pieces, including members of our Tea, Cake & Art group, and others who took part in our recent Extraordinary Postcardsexhibition.

Kate Rich, artist and trader currently based in Tasmania, presents Feral Business, a redefinition of enterprise as ‘any productive activity that could bring us sustenance‘. For In Your Hands, she will link Newlyn Art Gallery to a number of international endeavours by artists to establish alternative economies.

Other international artist networks will be represented by Mothers’ Days, a book that shares accounts of the same single day from 81 people in 19 countries—all members of An Artist Residency in Motherhood.

Our collective of young artists, the Collaborators, will be invited by artist Georgia Gendall to participate in her ongoing project Forced Collaboration, devising instructions for visitors to create artworks.

A series of Artpods will be released during the exhibition, revealing the conversations between the artists and their collaborators while creating their projects.