Echoes of Touch

Paris Hines

We learn the world through touch. Your mother’s hand in your hair, your father lifting you into his arms, your grandparents holding you on their knee. We explore our world by feeling it out, fuelling a growing understanding of the universe and how it works.

My toddler hands grasp at the paint, messy strokes in bold black lines across the canvas. It’s the only colour I seemed to use, until it suddenly goes missing. Years later I learnt about my mother’s concern with my constant use of black. I miss the feeling of the dark wet pigment on my fingers. My nana warns me the stove is hot, not to touch it for fear of being burned. How can you fear a burn you’ve never felt before? I have to touch it. Now I understand the fear of being burned. My aunt warns me the cat is old and angry. She won’t appreciate the eager grabbing hands of a child. She was right, as my skin is littered with angry red marks, and I listen to the yelp of my dog as she makes the same mistake of getting friendly with Smokey the cat.

“Lessons are learnt through touch, but at some point, that exploration is frowned upon.”

Lessons are learnt through touch, but at some point, that exploration is frowned upon. The desire for touch is scolded and reaching hands are glued firmly to sides.

Walking through the NGV, hands shoved into my pockets, there is so much I want to touch. Let me run my fingers across the soft, colourful side of the prowling cat. Let me explore the flowing fabrics of the house you’ve built. Let me touch everything I see, explore the feeling of it on the tips of my fingers. If I promise to be gentle, will you let me reach out for it? I ask this question with a guilty heart, knowing the answer. I follow my friends around, growing slightly bored, the original excitement wearing thin as the desire to feel everything in sight grows stronger. They stop to talk to their lecturer, and I’m not paying attention. Not to be rude, but my eyes have caught sight of something. Big, bright, bold letters scribbled onto the wall, next to holes in the wall. I want to crawl through the holes, like Alice through the rabbit hole to a world beyond this well-structured prison of look-but-don’t-touch.

Eventually, I’m able to convince my friends to go with me. As we head over, I am unable to contain my excitement. I stop to read the description of the piece but struggle to focus on the words long enough to process them. Instead, I pretend to read and wait for my friends to decide to move on. Each second they take feels like an hour, but to rush them, and sacrifice their experience for mine seems wrong. Still, it’s a bit agonising. Finally, we move on to the room, and I want to crawl through the smallest hole, but for the sake of my own dignity, I opt to just crouch down to walk through it. It’s the most vibrant room I’ve ever seen. Every surface is covered in a stunning mess of neon colours and scribbles, graffiti like scrawlings that contain no meaning in any human language, are scattered across the room. Soft structures that look like hairy half donuts come in various sizes around the room and I want to touch them. They look so soft and welcoming. I wish I could sit inside one, lean my back against the soft fur and shut out the rest of the world, while I read or write or listen to music. For once, there’s no reason to contain my excitement. I jump up and down, genuinely, like when I was a little kid, rushing to the nearest hairy donut (as I have now christened them) to feel the soft polka-dot fur. My friends follow along, but I’m not focused on them anymore. When you get closer, you can see holes in the surface of the donut structures, with small fuzzy cylinders inside. It’s not until I pick one up that I realise it has eyes! Just small black beads but for some reason, it’s incredibly cute. You can move them around, hold them, carry them around if you really want to, although I imagine it’d be frowned upon to take them from the swarming room. There are ceramics in the room as well, high up out of reach of small grabbing hands that might come through the gallery. So much of this piece is still out of reach. I’d love to touch them too, feel the smooth surface of the ceramic against my skin. For once, I can experience an art piece that I can physically interact with, but despite my mild disappointment, it’s outweighed tenfold by the excitement of experiencing the rest of the room. As hard as I try, the golden, sparkling honeycomb sculptures call to me. Up on their pedestal, separate from the rest, they require more care. Perhaps that’s what makes them special. What makes them unattainable, untouchable.

As a child, I was motivated by touch, and a desire to explore. These two often intertwined and resulted in several injuries, from touching thorns to hot stoves. But every burn, or cut, simply encouraged my curiosity. But the world is full of rules and regulations around who can and cannot touch what, when and where. For all my time spent in art galleries, I grew afraid to touch anything, as it so often wasn’t allowed. I was always a stickler for the rules. And slowly, these rules of touch crawled their way into every aspect of my life. As we got older, touch became taboo. If you touched a boy, you liked him. If you touched a girl, she was your best friend. Some people you couldn't touch at all, because you were told it wasn't right. And the closer people were, the more they'd hug, or hold hands, or link arms as they walked. But to get close to someone, you'd have to let them get close to you. Something I was struggling with. At school number four and five, I was finding it extremely difficult to believe in the permanence of these friendships in the way my friends did. For them, these were people they had known their whole lives. It only made sense that they'd be friends forever. I, however, had already experienced the cold dose of reality that is changing schools. Granted, many of those people stayed in the same areas, and are still friends to this day. But many more than that, have never seen each other since.

There are rules in art galleries and there are unspoken rules in life. For me, they so often felt one and the same. Respect others by remaining as silent as possible. You have no right to disturb their peace. Contain your joy or remove yourself from the situation that causes it. Do not touch the artwork. Do not touch anything in the gallery. Don’t touch anything ever if you can help it. Cause it’s not yours, or it’s dirty, or there’s simply no reason to, beyond to feel. That shouldn’t be hard, should it?

I waited for two hours in the scorching Italian sun at seven years old to see the statue of David. After the intensive heat, my childhood patience was wearing thin. I couldn’t sit or get near the statue or touch anything. Maybe I would have understood my mother’s awe if I had felt the cold marble against my skin. Perhaps I was just too young to understand, or my life too privileged. I think those were some of the best moments of my mother’s life, in those galleries that I didn’t fully understand. I felt as if I could feel her heart grow at every painting we passed, as she took photo after photo. I don’t think she ever thought she’d get to see most of them. The love and admiration my mum felt, seeped into the ground around my feet, soaking my shoes and rising up my legs, slowly filling my heart to the brim with a similar love. I’m not sure if my love and appreciation for art came from my heart or hers, but I know it fills my whole body with emotion. Emotion she has always allowed me to express. I’m not sure if she has the need for touch that I do. I think she does. We’re very similar. But even if she doesn’t, she is always there.

From the age of nine to fifteen, I hated being touched by anyone who wasn't my family. Or I thought I hated it. It had always been hard to ignore the need to reach out for things I found fascinating, or beautiful or comforting. It took a genuine effort to resist the urge to feel the paint beneath my fingers, the marble in my hand, as I walked through prestigious museums. It seems my brain linked those feelings with those I had for my friends. The admiration and emotion caused by friendships, the desire for understanding and the appreciation of imperfection and its beauty, felt so similar. So similar in fact, that I forced myself to avoid their touch. Touching anything I loved felt forbidden and touching anything I didn't love felt cheap. Trapped in a cycle of desire and rejection that I had forced onto myself; touch came with a longing I could barely ignore. I took solace in the hugs and casual touch of my family, the only thing my mind would allow me to experience without guilt. As I grew up, the need for touch became so intense that it could no longer be avoided. I was forcing myself to suffer based on rules I had created for myself that no one else seemed to know of or follow themselves. It was like I had put myself on house arrest for committing the crime of jaywalking. I finally accepted my need to interact with the world around me physically. I played piano, I drew, and I hugged, held hands, danced with and appreciated the seemingly unconditional love of my friends. Then the world changed. And touch was once again, a forbidden notion. 

I was barely trapped inside for two weeks, living in Adelaide at the time, but touch had once again become taboo, something we were all suddenly afraid of. Having people so close, yet so far, all in an effort to protect ourselves, caused an ache in my chest that grew as time went on. Separated from family in Melbourne by distance, separated from friends in Adelaide by fear. But for once in my life, I didn’t feel alone in my longing. And in this longing, the world turned back to art. In my own life, I was consumed by study, and my connection with art, my own or otherwise, faded and flickered, like a flame in the wind, suffocating my brain and soul. I struggled through, clawing my way towards my exams, while trying to maintain friendships that were clearly deteriorating but that I didn’t have the mental energy to fix.

Maybe that’s why I felt so much when experiencing Swarming by James Lemon. I have finally found myself in a city of art, studying the art I love the most, in a room where I can both touch and not touch so much. Maybe one day I’ll find an internal balance between my love of art and life and the way I experience touch, but for now, I will appreciate the small wins of life, and hope to see more of James Lemon’s pieces.