A lifetime of hands

Nachtegaallaan 13

You can tell a lot from someone’s hands. Have you ever done that? Read someone by the physical appearance of their hands? Have the hands been through a lot, are they working hands or undamaged and smooth? Presenting hands clearly in this way makes you, as an observer, very aware of your own pair. Especially now, after a long period of not being able to touch each other’s hands, they can now return to the spotlight in this project ‘A lifetime of hands’.

Toos Nijssen has been fascinated by portraits her whole life, portraits of faces and of hands.. In search of diversity and personal handwriting, she encounters 43 pairs of hands in this series. The subjects of the portraits are residents of Vitalis Woonzorg Centrum in Gestel, 2017. For two months, she lived in a mobile studio, or rather a container, that was set up on the Vitalis site. Young and old visited her for this project ‘A lifetime of hands’. Residents, their children and grandchildren visited the temporary studio and sat down with their hands on a cushion. Toos turned on the camera and left. A moment of conscious reflection for her models to think about the report. The participants remained seated for five to ten minutes, and Toos selected one minute for her report. All those video’s together form the work ‘A lifetime of hands’.