I've been casting my hands for a few years now. There is something so powerful in the human gesture and how that gesture can be manipulated with material and presentation. When I was young, I was told I was "girl-ish" because of how I placed my hands on my hips. In research for the Southern Studies Fellowship, my collaborator and I discovered that there are entire blogs dedicated to whether or not a Civil War soldier in a portrait is a man or a disguised woman because of how their hands are placed on a chair or the back of another person. And then, of course, in childhood, don't we all learn some form of song or poem with hand motions intimately attached?
