A creative practice exploring the movement and connections of my hands / Victoria Malin (2017)

“A creative practice exploring the movement and connections of my hands” is an autoethnographic inquiry informed by personal experiences and other perspectives and disciplines of research.

The artist Victoria Malin gives an account of a creative process in relation to her encounters with professionals across the fields of art and science. The artists own perspectives and bodily experience are central to the research, as she explores the possibilities of movement with her hands. The inquiry explores particular connections between the hands as a result of ‘a-typical’ neurological processes to better understand their effect on her movement and experiences. Possibilities of movement are explored by engaging with manual activities considered to improve strength and fine motor control. From these experiences emergent insights are acknowledged and reflected on by the artist. The process examines the specific use and configurations of different ‘tools’ of practice, such as moving, speaking, writing and drawing. These tools are suggested to support multiple ways of learning that engage with different senses of the body. The practice identifies and shares the artists building of knowledge, regarding both the specific research inquiry and its relation to the continued development of her artistic practice. Through multiple forms of action and reflection, the process reveals particular expectations and assumptions the artist has of her body, and how these perceptions are challenged as the research unfolds.

These personal insights echo wider cultural ideas of what is ‘normal’. The research also informed the artist to consider an impulse to find orders and hierarchies of thought and action. This led to creative choices that invited her perceived authority of scientific information, or the value of one creative tool over another to be questioned. Although a personally benefitting study, the research could be seen to resonate with other human experiences, such as hand dominance.