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My hours in the studio are spent looking down at my hands. They became unfastened agents, disconnected from an analytic mind and possessed by their own embodied intelligence. I've worked this way for a long time — as long as I can remember — shuffling pages, cutting images, gluing, piling material and books. This is a show about that lateral, first person perspective; it is about the making flat of something fleshy and the making subject of sight through touch.
This work also traces my son's movements. He is three years old; I watch him work diligently to understand the contours of his own body — where the inside meets the outside — by tracing the outline his own hand on paper. I don't know where he learned to do this activity, which has become a daily, usually solitary ritual. I collect all of the discarded shapes, lopsided and discontinuous. They are evidence of self discovery: making art through and of his hand. The drawings are pinned up in my studio, a reminder of the ways in which we both work to understand the shapes of our bodies (and their uneven capacities) in the world. – Carmen Winant
