GALLERI I

Talking Hands

Before a body speaks, it listens. Listening begins long before birth, through multiple senses, becoming perhaps, the body’s first way to orientate itself in the world. After listening, language can begin to form. A language that speaks of what’s essential.

The 2025 graduation exhibition from HDK-Valand’s Master programme in Craft suggests that speaking happens not only through words, but through objects shaped by years of attentive listening. Through listening, themes and questions emerge: How can we materially remember and re-enact dialects and spells that have been forgotten? How does wearing jewellery and clothes create desire and leave traces on our bodies? What does it mean to decorate the everyday and mundane objects we surround ourselves with? How can textiles act as a medium for anticipatory grief? What is the meaning of place and belonging for objects in constant migration? How can traditional craft techniques be applied in new ways, in order to create new abstract images and stories? How can symbolic clay objects help us understand our experiences beyond words?

Together, these questions form a prism of objects through which to view the world and the students’ interpretations of the society they inhabit. Each work reveals carefully chosen materials, methods, and techniques, developed through the rigorous processes of their degree projects. The works arise from an educational context that demands not only technical skill in the studio and workshop, but also conceptualisation, writing as a means of contextualising their work and collective engagement. A final exhibition is a beginning. The start of many careers of artistic practice, showing fragments of what has been
achieved during a solid education, fragments of possibility. The fragments shown in Talking Hands offer important clues to what lies ahead, they show that the future of craft is multifaceted, critical, technically distinctive, beautiful — and, above all, hopeful.

——
Åsa Dybwad Norman
Senior Lecturer in Textile Art
HDK-Valand

Participating artists:
Emma Holmgren