Why Have My Hands Strayed

“Why have my hands strayed to the brushes?” wrote Rainer Maria Rilke in The Book of Monastic Life (1899). The poem’s question is less about anatomy or orientation, but rather about the enigmatic direction and goal of the creative impulse. In many of the works in the exhibition, hands appear as metaphors for the straying and wandering of the unconscious mind and raise questions about the relationship between body and mind – a meeting point that is not always easy to locate. How does thought take form in the body? What does the body know that the mind can’t? These works suggest the hand as an interface between internal and external, translating intention into motion without always passing through conscious thought. As Rilke’s poem reminds us, action often begins not with certainty, but with a reach into the dark.