Katrina Hui
Hands
Hands have always held a certain intrigue for me. I think it arose from my mother’s peculiar fascination with hands. When I was growing up, it was routine for her to take my hands into hers and meticulously feel out every square inch of my palm and fingers; it was her strange way of checking-in on my wellbeing. Upon the discovery of dryness or any calluses, she would shake her head in disapproval and send me in the direction of the nearest bottle of lotion. She would always tell me that you could judge a person by his or her hands. “Hands are how you do your work. If you don’t take care of your hands, you aren’t well-equipped to take on the world,” she would say.
As unscientific as my mother’s reasoning was, I believe there is an element of truth in that statement. Hands are very much the means through which we interact with the world. The renowned scientist and author Jacob Bronowski once said, “The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.” Much of how far we have come as a species can be attributed to our hands. Our opposable thumbs have granted us with fine motor control that most other species lack. Our thumb pads can rotate to be diametrically opposed to the finger pads of our four other fingers, and this has allowed for the development and use of tools, writing, and the creation of art. If you look around and choose any non-natural object, it is evident that human touch has played a significant role in its creation. Leonardo da Vinci captured this notion perfectly: “Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.”
Artistic Project
To me, touch is humanizing. There is something beautiful and fascinating about how it is the first sense to emerge. Touch is the means through which we interact with the external world, and more importantly, with others. It is intimately tied with communication and expression. In creating a piece that ties developmental biology with aesthetics, I hoped to draw attention to this underappreciated and all-too-often overlooked sense in both fields of study.
My aim was to show the importance of touch in my Senior Reflection project and thought that this idea could be captured not only by the content of my work but also in the media itself. In a sense, my work would be art about art, or “meta-art. I created a series consisting of three pieces focusing on hands: Apoptosis, Left-Hand Man, and Paresthesia. The series employed a combination of photography, digital illustrations, and pencil sketches to explore the role and directness of touch in art in different media. Pencil sketches, for example, require the human touch and the physical contact of pencil to paper in a way that digital art and photography do not. I wanted to track the expansion of art over time as well, which has evolved thanks to technology and other innovative avenues. Thus, I included works reminiscent of both primitive artwork like cave finger paintings and more novel media like digitally rendered images. In exploring the advancement of art under this lens, I wanted to raise the question of whether art becomes less of an art or perhaps less human as touch becomes less important.
The Sense of Touch
Touch is an interesting and complex sense. It emerges at around 7.5 weeks post-fertilization as is demonstrated by the fetus’ responsiveness to touch on its lips and cheek (Hooker, 1952). Furthermore, the first sense to develop in the womb, which I find symbolic and telling of something fundamental about living creatures. There is also a lasting permanence to touch unlike other senses, which often deteriorate and fade with age. Field writes, “[Touch] functions even after seeing and hearing begin to fade.”
It is important to note that touch can refer to two distinct phenomena: the contact of an object on skin and the processing of stimuli acting on the sensory system, such as the feeling of warmth. Touch receptors, also called mechanoreceptors, are unevenly distributed in the body and the hand, particularly the palmar side, which is home to hundreds of receptors per fingertip, giving the hand for a highly-developed capacity for touch and expression unlike other random body parts such as shoulder blades and elbows. The body registers a multitude of different types of stimuli: time, intensity, pressure, tempo, rhythmicity, directionality, and shape. Combinations of these inputs can result in the interpretation of emotion, and further, the communication of emotion. In 2001, Hertenstein and Campos found that touch may play a role in regulating emotion in infancy. The researchers compared the effects of an increased maternal grip on an infant’s abdomen while inhaling sharply to and a relaxed grip. They found that infants subjected to an increased grip displayed more negative emotions as compared to those who had experience a relaxed grip.
Apoptosis
My first piece was entitled Apoptosis, to draw attention to the biological process by which hands form. Apoptosis is the scientific term for the process of programmed cell death that occurs in the multicellular organisms. Apoptosis occurs to remove old or damaged cells but it is also how finger separation arises. Hands initially begin looking like paddles and digits subsequently differentiate via programmed cell death of the webbing and cellular structures between fingers.
Apoptosis was based on developmental biology and tracked the stages of the hand from its embryonic form to its neonatal one. It consisted of five images of the human hand at differential stages of development. The first image is of the fetal hand at week 6, the point at which the fetal hand becomes the recognizable. Subsequent images portrayed the human hand as progressively more fully formed up until its neonate structure. The creation of this piece hinged on photographs of the hand at different stages of development from a research paper conducted Lacrois, Wolff-Quenot, and Haffen. I used Photoshop to recreate the images of form of the hands from weeks 6 through 14, at which point the hand is morphological identical (though not in size) to its neonate form. The hands were place in a horizontally fashion to represent a step-wise and roughly linear progression and were skewed to the right with a long strip of plain black preceding the first hand image. This was done to emphasize the interesting emergence of complexity in humans and in all biology in general.
Color was important in conveying the idea of warmth both in the literal sense and in the emotional sense. Blue tones are associated with cold and distance while red tones are evocative of passion, warmth, love, etcetera. With fetal/embryonic growth, metabolic demands raise, especially during critical periods of development like organ and body growth and tissue differentiation. Estimates place total metabolic energy production directed toward accretion at around 14%, with the remaining energy used for ion pumping and cell turnover (Jones & Rolf, 1985). The piece used a progressive change in rainbow colors from blue to red as a visual representation of increasing warmth and to show the further development of touch and the increasing importance of that connection between mother and child and later child and world.
More important to me than the biological nature underlying hand development is the role that touch plays in behavior and emotional growth. Touch itself is crucial in normal development in humans and other animals as well. Harry Harlow performed famous experiments on rhesus monkeys to examine the nature of attachments between mother and child, and found that warmth was more fundamental in this type of relationship than the physiological need of nutrition. Jutapakdeegul et al. (2003) found that neonatal rats that had undergone regular touch stimulation had significantly lower levels of corticosteroids and thus, lower levels of stress. Other studies found that maternally-deprived neonatal rats had less exploratory behavior in adulthood in addition to locomotor hyperactivity, cognitive impairments, and reductions in maternal care in adulthood (Gonzalez and Fleming, 2002; Gonzalez et al., 2001; Lovic and Fleming, 2004). Similar studies performed in the seventies on primates showed that infant rhesus macaques that had undergone social isolation demonstrated reduced play behavior, higher levels of aggression, poorer performances on learning and cognitive discrimination tasks and a heightened fear-response to novelty (Suomi et al., 1971; Seay et al., 1964; Seay and Harlow, 1965). This same emphasis on touch is found in the mother-infant interactions in humans as well. Tactile stimulation has been shown to calm infants and may have a profound effect on infant sensory, cognitive, physical and psychological development (Field 1998). Clearly, touch is essential in development and may even prove beneficial to the wellbeing of infants.
Left-Hand Man
Left-Hand Man used photographs of fingerprints and handprints and was meant to be suggestive of primitive cave paintings. One particular source of inspiration was the paintings found in the Chauvet Cave in France, which is home to the earliest known cave paintings dating back to over 30,000 years ago. These paintings are clear evidence of direct touch playing a role in the creation of art. There are paintings showing outlines of hands but even paintings of other subject matter like those depicting animal depictions reveal prints and hand-like shapes.
Left-Hand Man is a commentary on the importance of individuality in creation and art and the image’s large size was done to highlight the distinctive palm and fingerprint patterns. Three different fingerprint patterns exist: arches, whorls, and ulnar loops. As is commonly known, each individual’s fingerprints are unique and can be used for identification purposes. The fingerprints in the piece act as a signature and a representation of how the artist can leave his mark in his work and the world.
Less well known than the distinctiveness of fingerprints is the interesting scientific component to the piece. Oftentimes, genetics can influence the types of formations in the hand. For instance, females tend to have higher proportions of arches than men. Racial variation exists as well – the Japanese tell to have more whorls than Europeans and Americans. Even more interestingly, autosomal and sex chromosome disorders can be detected in the patterning of palmar creases and/or fingerprints. Dermatoglyphics, the scientific study of fingerprints, can offer crucial information about embryogenesis between 4 weeks to 20 weeks of life. Several diseases are detectable from these patterns and creases found in the hand. For example, patients with Klinefelter’s Syndrome tend to have fewer whorls and fingerprint ridges. Those suffering from Down’s syndrome have higher proportions of ulnar loops, and about 50% of them possess a “Simian line,” a single palmar crease across the hand. This same Simian line is seen in patients with Patau’s syndrome, Edward’s Syndrome, Cri du chat, and Noonan’s syndrome. The aberrations detected in the hand can be used as a tool to diagnose patients suffering from these genetic conditions.
Paresthesia
Paresthesia was named after is the medical term for the feeling of tingling and numbness commonly referred to as “pins and needles” experienced when a limb “falls asleep.” This piece consists of five drawings in combination with digitally altered photographs of hands spelling out the word “touch” in American Sign Language. The right sides of the images are comprised of the photographs made to mimic the look of pin art impressions, which capture the 3-D imprint of an object. This aim of this work was to explore the role of language in human interactions and to examine the form of human hand for artistic study.
I am not the first to use the hand as a main subject of study; many before have done the same. Hands are expressive; they are used for gesturing and communicating certain ideas. However, more importantly, hands are easily accepted and understood as a metaphor for touch; they are the first body part pictured when the word “touch” is mentioned. This association is made clear by their omnipresence in art. For instance, the focal point of Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam” on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is the hands; Adam’s index finger reaches out toward God’s, so that the touch of God can imbue Adam with life. Another well-known example is “The Lady and the Unicorn,” a collection of tapestries which portray the five senses. In the tapestry representing the sense of touch, a lady has her hand placed on a unicorn’s horn as if to show that the unicorn has been tamed by her touch. My primary source of inspiration was Auguste Rodin, who created more sculptures of hands than any other artist. His models were fashioned by the use of his own hands, and in that way, they embody the parallels between the artistic media and the subject matter that I strived for in my own work. The pervasiveness of this connection between hands and touch in art reinforced my goal to make my art accessible to the audience.
I also wanted to explore the intersection between art and language in this work. The spoken and written word is used to convey ideas and sentiments through literature or poetry; however, over forms of language such as sign language are left by the wayside. I took a class my junior year Bio 150 I Human Behavioral Biology last spring and learned about several research studies point to interesting things about sign language. Neural wiring for sign language is rooted in the same centers as spoken/written language rather than mainly in the motor cortex. One study revealed that auditory cortex in an ASL user gets activated when he is being “spoken to” and control trials reveal that the same process does not occur when they are recipients of random hand waving. Just like speakers, ASL users also demonstrate prosody, nonverbal cues including emotion, tone, emphasis, rhythm, gestures, etcetera. Curiously as well, accents are found in American Sign Language based on region. Furthermore, different sign languages exist in different countries, and as is the case with learning additional non-sign languages, non-native sign language can only be spoken without an accent if it is learned sufficiently early in life.
Conclusion
This was my first foray into an art-related class in college and it was interesting to track the evolution of my idea over the course of the year. I became intimately familiar with the creative process and realized how much more rigorous it was than I had previously envisioned. In many ways, this project has been challenging in that, unlike other science-related projects where there is a well-defined project and/or goal, trying to wait for inspiration to strike is not something that can be planned. For me, having a unique approach and originality was a desideratum but it was difficult to try to search for sources of inspiration while maintaining originality.
With regards to my art project, I always had the fear that an idea that took inspiration from other artists’ work was unoriginal. As Herman Melville famously said, “It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.” One fundamental difference between biological research and art is that in my experience it has been easier to draw from other research papers or scientists, since, while originality and innovation are key in science, academic collaboration is crucial and encouraged in order to promote the exchange of ideas. The creation of art often draws from other material whether it be in life or other people’s work, but at the same time must be a uniquely independent entity.
Embracing my artistic side countered the notion that, as a science major, I ought not to devote myself to my other hobbies. Furthermore, developing my artistic side has enriched my Stanford experience and arguably equipped me with certain skills that may be even prove beneficial in my future career in medicine. For instance, it has been shown that art history majors are more well-equipped in many ways to be physicians that traditional science majors because of their training in analysis which lends itself very well to diagnosis. In fact, in 2008, a research study performed by the Harvard Medical School examined medical students who had take a course in art appreciation and found that they were 38% more successful in diagnosing conditions than those who did not take the course. Undertaking this project and class was a refreshing way to end my undergraduate career. I have come to realize that the two normally disparate fields of art and science can be synergistic in general but especially within.
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