Girls Rule: The Artist Image Project #3 – Hand

To coincide with our Girls Rule issue, Contributing Visual Arts editor Susanna-Davies Crook invited 21 artists who are women to contribute artwork to create this artist image project: contributing an ongoing dialogue around the body, voice, hand and heart – all pop tropes of embodiment often levelled at the work of female artists. All this week, artists such as Jennifer Chan, Holly White and SALT's Jala Wahid will be sharing images around each motif. Keep checking back on Girls Rule: The Artist Image Project for more. 

For a generation seduced by interfaces – exchanging heat for words and investing emotional labour in touchscreens – the hand hovers over the information gateway. Digits appear in silhouette, backlit and poised, ready to access. Our contemporary concern with image as surface, texture and haptics kept at arms length, is placing emphasis back on what it is to touch and receive at a distance. Artists are responding through conflating surfaces and objects in work which questions the operation and role of the screen in delivering images. Working with new softwares and HD mediums they are harnessing the exploratory power of image-aware material gestures in painting, sculpture, film and video. The following five artists respond to the dextrous motif of the hand.

An Unknown Species in Full Resolution

"Chameleon is the ultimate survival skill; beauty is a public institution." Kate Cooper, www.autoitaliasoutheast.org 

I've got a burning desire (come on, tell me boy)

"Packed nicely and tightly, not too thick. The paper holds firmly, burning evenly and slowly, and the air begins creamy, but will taste sweeter if held in the mouth. They're generally quite smooth, maybe not as coarse as you'd find other ones." Jala Wahid, www.jalawahid.com and saltmagazine.tumblr.com

Juicy fruit unglazed

"Gum on the paving stones, fruits on the chopping board, an undecided juicy fruit." Berry Patten, www.berrypatten.co.uk

For Lovers of Opinion

"Modulor man wiggles his hips across a deep green of silk fibroin, tickled by orange villi." Josephine Callaghan, www.josephinecallaghan.net

Matisse Baby

"Matisse’s beauty leans upon a plaster slab, made in response to his painterly short-hand." Stefania Batoeva, stefaniabatoeva.com