0225
08-11-2021
HAND 1.0
Maud van den Beuken
Visual Artist

Hand 1.0 (2021) is one of nine handprints from the year 1250, from which Maud van den Beuken made a cast in silicone rubber.

During a residency in Hamburg, she visited Hauptkirche St. Katharinen, the oldest church in Hamburg. Here she came upon the crawl spaces above the vaults of the church. ‘In the skin’ of the church, at the back of the plaster domes, she found handprints left by the workers who constructed the church in the year 1250. Just as the church in Christianity is a physical representation of God, the creator of heaven and earth, Van den Beuken’s practice seeks a method of duplicating the earth on a 1:1 scale. The hand is one of our body’s most direct sensors for physically relating to the Earth as a space.

The hand, while traveling around the world in a toolbox, forms a tool to scan the earth.

Material: wood, metal, silicone rubber, plaster residue from the domes of the Hauptkirche St. Katharinen in Hamburg, Germany.

-MvdB
www.maudvandenbeuken.nl