Sara B. – Hand on Heart
When we were briefed with this project “Hand on Heart”, I knew I wanted to take a more experimental approach. I had loose, evolving ideas and wanted my piece to be immersive in some way. Throughout the piece’s development and guided by Arty-Folks facilitators I played with acrylic and watercolour paints, paper, varied fabrics, pen, card and more and explored how they all interacted with each other. Even though the overall design of the piece was ever-changing my desire to use a range of mediums stayed consistent.
I feel now that this piece talks about how throughout your life, different things will try to grab a piece of your heart like hobbies, nature, people and much more. Some of those things will be selfish and want to snatch your heart for themselves at your detriment, while others might be beneficial to you and only wish to support your heart. They might try to even help or sabotage each other, losing sight of your heart but still linger close. Regardless of this chaos, your heart will still stand strong and be vibrant and prominent.
This was for two reasons: Firstly, this was to have the viewer be able to feel the heart along with the hands, but also to honour the complexity and fluidity of humans. We all have aspects of ourselves (our quirks or traits) that stand out and originate from our love for things- from our heart- and having the different mediums contrast from each other, as well as having a flexible design, reflects that.
Some scrapped ideas due to time and the piece evolving away from their need include having the hands depict various things in life rather than being plain white, adding flowers and using an even more varied range of mediums such as markers and pencils.
When viewed online the artwork’s texture, presence and depth is lost. Those things can only be felt in person where the piece will lure you to touch the heart, just as the painted hands are. Your hand joins the hoard, and thus makes you no different, as it is human to desire the feeling of being special to someone and experience, not just see, their heart.
