>5 Hand-ness (Objects 41-50)

Fifty objects later, this blog has taken a life of its own. It has veered toward celebrating the importance of hand-ness. Objects 41-50 celebrate handcrafting; they celebrate bamboo; and they celebrate tactility. Handcrafting, to me, is an uneven equation, leaning more toward hand than toward crafting. The hand is the most human -probably the most soulful- of organs. Everything we do is hand-dependent to a degree, usually to a high degree. Hands mediate between the world and our intentions; they are the port of entry and the exit channel to us; they define the continuous exchange we have with our environment at all times. Hands give sense to expression. Craft emerges from hands and it remains a testimony to their importance, as any of these last ten objects can attest. Every one of them is highly tactile as well and, together, they emerge as a group of things that share a certain character of anonymity in their extraordinary design. Design is hand-ness. Hand-ness is the hand factor that all things have, their ability to reflect on how they were made and by whom; their capacity to identify the human soul and the human needs. Hand-ness is a superb design quality, one of the most essential. After this last batch, I will be actively looking for it in any and every object I will examine. Bamboo is a high hand-ness material, as the marvelous bamboo objects shown in this last group sufficiently prove.