Hands repeatedly appear throughout Hiroko Masuko’s works, whether in drawings or sculptures. We tend to think that we understand the world primarily through the mind, yet Masuko’s work suggests another possibility: that we feel, think, and come to know through our hands. Her works invite us to imagine the hand as something closely connected to human intelligence, guiding our actions and our relationship with the world. Rather than touching because we desire to do so, perhaps it is the bodily experience of having touched that first gives rise to sensation and desire.
This work is made from dog chews. As dogs bite them, their forms gradually change, bearing the traces of teeth and saliva. In this sense, the material can be understood as a support that records bodily contact and preserves its memory. Two years after creating this work, Masuko produced contactless treatment (2021), a sculpture of a vinyl hand. It was inspired by an episode during the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil, where nurses, unable to touch patients directly, filled disposable plastic gloves with warm water and wrapped them around patients’ hands as a substitute for human touch.
For Masuko, drawing and making hands may not simply be a matter of representing their form, but an attempt to evoke the tactile memories they carry. The unusual material of the dog chew likewise contains traces of contact between body and matter. By leading us toward a tactile experience that precedes language, this work seems to trace the underlying currents of sensation from which human action and our relationship with the world emerge.