I made it a project to document hands in the State Library of Victoria. I thought it would be meaningful to capture something about their shapes, all folded, clasped, open, holding, pausing, gesticulating, in five or six different mediums and forms. Call it a jumper cable for the mind. Hand in oils on a lap, a shoulder, a jug. The image of Jesus in the galleries surrounded by hands. Pointing, shimmering, disembodied. Star hands. Hammer hands, hanging on the navy blue walls.

Through hands one finds a kind of permission---a permission, I figure, to read meaning into a world that lacks it. In such generous readings we are permitted to find the good news that we are certain is out there but which refuse steadfastly to appear before us; because of one divine reason or another, hands speak, because the world does not.

In the closed palms of a saint, the furrowed wood speaks the sculptor’s tools, which brings to mind the stubbornness of the touch of a scar. And of scars I am also thinking of the signatures in the ruby room on Batman’s Treaty, where the Wurundjeri elders had gathered to furnish their signatures in their own hand and in the bottom-right corner of the contract are the bright red wax seals and the markings of five to six pairs of horses. The exhibition calls the act “diabolical”. On the parchment it is a blind exchange of hands.

In other paintings, horses arch and gallop, hands grip the reins, the knuckles brown. Fire grips the horizon. “Flocking with tales of distress and horror.” Vines grip the babies’ wrists on the edge of the chair, frozen botanical forms, carved from plundered mahogany.

And then there are hands that cup and hands that grasp in self-portraiture: the camera strap dangling from the photographer’s unselfconscious neck, the manicured nails on the Leica. The photographer says, I am making myself in the likeness of myself through that miracle of film that records the subtle bloom of the light across the room. (Likewise, the phone camera records but it does not yield the history of the hand behind it.)

A man carries a stick across the ground. The brushstrokes making up his body are laid gingerly upon the certainty of the green in the foreground, as if the artist had hesitated to place him down. The vegetation surrounds him softly. This is one of few paintings here of the Wurundjeri. Elsewhere, shelves weigh down with books weigh down with photographs… court decisions, exchanges of land.

Perhaps the gesture allows what is outside ourselves to speak. It brings to light the fractures, deepens them, tends to the wounds. The impermanence of the touch remains. Like the hoisted hand in prayer, what stays is a record of skin on air, blooming.