Why are artists and designers making furniture so “handsy”? Hands are everywhere in design: on lamps, tables, chairs and mirrors; in wicker and ceramic; grabbing, touching and gesticulating. The results range from playful to unsettling.
“I was always obsessed with the hands in Rodin’s sculptures — and the emotion that can be displayed through singular body parts,” says LA-based artist Vincent Pocsik, whose furniture featuring hands was on show with gallery Nazarian / Curcio at Frieze Los Angeles in February. While Pocsik also depicts ears and feet, hands are particularly expressive. “I understand more through my hands and touching than I do through any other sense — so in that way it’s a bit of a self-portrait,” he says.
In “Bench with Lemons Hands and Ears” (2024), the carved walnut frame morphs into surreal disembodied ears, arms and hands caught in the act of picking lemons. It’s like a Hieronymus Bosch painting. The motif of hands picking fruit recurs in Pocsik’s work, drawing on his past; he grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, where his grandparents had planted pear and plum trees. Meanwhile, “Remember Your Hands” (2024), an elegant mirror integrating carved hands and foliage, draws on the memory of his mother telling him to “remember your hands” when he felt anxious as a child. “It was about focusing on this singular body part and remembering your own body — a kind of mindfulness.”
Gerald Mak, a London-based artist and ceramicist from Hong Kong, depicts seas of hands in his works, displaying various gestures such as the “OK” sign or crossed fingers. “Central to my practice is an interest in people, relationships and social behaviours — for me hand gestures represent these connections,” he says.
Mak began to carve hand motifs into clay while undertaking a residency in Jingdezhen, China — a historic centre of ceramic production. His table, “Handle with Care” (2023), and two variations of “Porcelain Garden Stool” (2024) were shown in London last autumn at County Hall Pottery’s Formations in Clay Furniture exhibition. In one stool, hands are interlaced with olive branches, “as a play on the symbolic gesture of goodwill”, Mak says. For the table, he combined the “playful and cheeky” with the “more numinous”, such as hands inspired by Guanyin, a Buddhist figure associated with compassion and mercy.
Mak also sees hand motifs as an emblem of himself as a maker. “The hand gesture becomes this symbol of agency and labour,” he says.
It’s a sentiment shared by Chris Wolston, an American artist and designer based between New York and Medellín, Colombia: “I’m drawn to the duality of the hand — both as a tool of creation and as a subject within the work,” he says. In his “Touch Me Chair 2” (2024), recently exhibited at The Future Perfect in New York, the curved shearling back is covered in a mass of overlapping wicker hands. “This sensory relationship between the object and the body [ . . . ] brings the furniture to life,” he says. The resulting scene appears like a hoard of zombies — or a symbol of togetherness. In “Touch Me Table” (2024), a ceramic top depicts multicoloured hands rendered joyfully and simplistically in childlike form.
There’s a surrealist sensibility in the work of New York artist Genesis Belanger. Her stoneware “Lady Lamps”, an ongoing series since 2017, take the form of hands crossed over a bust, topped by a lamp in place of a head. “I think adding human features to something like a lamp is a tidy way to talk about objectification,” Belanger says.
Her pieces are influenced by her experience working in advertising and prop-styling, where she saw that “we as a culture are completely fine with separating bits of women’s bodies — like a disembodied hand — to sell things,” she says. In her work, Belanger “looks for vehicles to talk about human experience and the ways in which we treat certain parts of society as if they are the furniture”.
Whether through personal expression or societal subversion, hands can carry a range of meanings. Just don’t be surprised if they reach out from the next bench you sit on.
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