The project À table! delves into the concept of traces as a medium, highlighting the subtle and invisible marks we leave behind during the simple act of sharing a meal.
We use our hands for everything and every day. Hands can touch, feel and grab. On everything they come in contact with, they leave traces. While gathering for lunch with my family, we covered our hands with charcoal from our fireplace in order to record these traces on a table cloth. These shape a language around a space, here the dining table, which is repeated on a daily basis. This repetition of the act of touching creates a high level of intimacy between the hand/body and the elements being touched.
My research began by exploring different types and areas of repair, and one topic which came out was skin. This idea stuck with me, and I started exploring the aging and decay of skin by photographing my mother’s hands and mine. When looking at the images, I noticed the difference between our skin textures. Hers showed signs of aging and the texture was more prominent. This led me to research more into the pattern of skin and I came across J. Edgar Hoover’s article entitled Fingerprint (2024). The author explains how fingerprints are used as an infallible means of personal identification and their invariable nature. Indeed, small cuts and burns do not affect our fingerprints, they grow back to what they have always been. These traces which our hands leave behind are, most of the time, unseen to the human eye. Artists like Juliet Seger, founder of HUMAN TOUCH, a fashion company, decided to make the workers’ labour visible by covering their hands in paint. While sewing the clothes, the paint creates a permanent pattern on the fabrics revealing the work and level of care put into the making. This amplifies the emotional connection to the object and, as argued by Lara Farina in Feeling Things, Objects and Emotions through History (2018) “feeling other people’s feeling of and about objects […] is also a way of feeling the object itself”.
The permanent aspect of fingerprints and handprints comes with a few paradoxes. Indeed, they reveal themselves when observed and examined very closely, leaving unknown marks all around, physically and emotionally. While remaining identical our whole life, the skin itself around fingerprints ages and evolves over time, revealing an important contradiction: our uniqueness fails to capture our identity as the human body is in constant evolvement.
À table! highlights the invisible traces my family and I leave behind while gathering for a meal over the holidays, a moment of sharing and caring for one another. We have covered our hands with charcoal and made prints of every object used during our meal on the table cloth. Before concluding on this proposal, I first started by taking prints of my hands and fingers using different mediums, from charcoal to simple digital prints, revealing the pattern of my own skin, and then my mother’s through drawings. The name of the project À table! translates as “Lunch’s ready!” in French, a phrase my mother has been saying even since I was a child.
