The exhibition title is taken from the essay 'The Eyes of the Skin' by architectural theorist Juhani Pallasmaa who writes about the hegemony of vision and suppression of the other senses, which coincided with the Cartesian disconnection from our bodies, and came hand in hand with separation from the nature and domination over it.

The consequences have never been clearer.

As we stopped feeling the world and started thinking the world, we stopped living in harmony with it. Pallasmaa writes: "the hegemonic eye [...] seems to weaken our capacity for empathy, compassion and participation with the world." To gaze from the distance with the attitude of critical analysis is to miss the soft subtleties of the world around us. We watch, but we don’t see. To 'touch' the world, on the other hand, is to feel and intuit; to truly notice it.

Care naturally follows. 

This exhibition brings together artists whose works incite corporeal rather than cerebral engagement with the world. As they speak to the body, they invite the audience to adapt a ‘haptic gaze’ which is described by Martine Beugnet (in ‘Cinema and Sensation’) as “a mode of visual perception akin to the sense of touch, where the eye… becomes responsive to qualities usually made-out through skin contact.”

Thomas Thorby-Lister and Vitor Queiroz, explore the capacity of the 2D images to generate strong sensorial experience. Perceived through our skin, as textures, their works remind us of our own materiality, and fragility.

Anja Dimitrijevic’s and Evgeny Vtorov’s video works have a similar effect; reminding us of the impact that the environment and the natural forces have on our frail human bodies. In their works they create a poetic dialogue between the human body and the natural elements, such as wind, snow, rocks... By the way of mirroring, as we watch, we too are made conscious of our own physicality and the relationship to the space around us.

Amongst these 2D works sit gentle sculptural pieces of Hannah Rose Carroll Harris, made of found Berlin concrete and paraffin wax. A size of our palms, these works evoke a sense of touch more concretely, making the tactile interaction with the world quite palpable. With their juxtaposition of fragility and strength, these works seem a poignant metaphor to how our bodies feel within the nature, and what the nature feels like at the moment.

“Touch is the Mother of all Senses” prods us to relate to the world at the proximity of the skin, and not at the distance of the gaze. This somatic interaction, we feel, revitalizes sensitivity, empathy, respect, and protection of the environment.

Ira Ferris (February, 2020)

Dutch photographer Marlous Van der Sloot describes how she uses ‘haptic visuality’ in her work which focuses on restoring physicality to our overly rational minds.

“I’m trying to reach the sense of touch and physicality through the eyes, which is an interesting approach precisely because of this distance that we have. In our modern societies we use our eyes a lot, so to use that as a tool to get back to the touch is really nice. […] I do that through working with sensuous things such as water, snow, sand, a bad sheet. It can be done with anything that has a relation to the body.”

This sound collage is an extract from the Eastside Radio 89.7FM interview recorded in February 2015 while Marlous exhibited as part of ‘Dear Sylvia’ exhibition at the Australian Centre for Photography (Sydney), curated by Claire Monneraye.