Baby Blue Hands
Hands move across screens.
Pages are rubbed.
Layers gather, digital and tactile, entwined.
These accumulated gestures form Baby Blue Hands (2025, 7 min), a work in which maternal touch shapes both digital and physical creation. Each decision about what to share involved careful weighing between vulnerability and intimacy, between what could be offered and what needed to remain held back.
Minor gestures begin to matter: fleeting sighs, quiet background voices, small movements that slip beneath dominant narratives. These fragments seep into the work as edges and textures, traces of care that quietly structure the videos rather than announce themselves.
Round hands are becoming more inquisitive, more daring in their touching, kneading my skin, pulling my hair, grasping whatever is close. Her hands press and search for milk. Alongside this, my own feelings are conflicted: wanting rest, wanting to do other things, wanting to stay inside these moments. I hold my smartphone in one hand and her in the other arm, trying to follow the wiggling digits circling my body.
The moving image itself is short, but the labour behind it is not. Editing becomes a slow, bodily process, my fingers tracing her grasping, folding movements frame by frame. The work, like motherhood, remains unsatisfying. It is never enough. It offers only a glimpse, a tiny moment, after a day of labour that appears, from the outside, as almost nothing.
Here, aesthetic choices become ethical decisions. Images are partially obscured, skin is veiled, and pauses are inserted. Selective withholding becomes a way of protecting intimacy while still recording the textures of maternal labour. The process is documented, revisited, and reused, looped back on itself until it becomes a practice in its own right.
I move back and forth across time, rewatching, re-editing, layering touch across moments. Images, videos, links, experimental materials, acts of care, frustration, mistakes, and even empty blanks are all held together. Nothing is excluded from being unfinished or incomplete.
This intimacy is further veiled through a layer of blue skies. Baby Blue Hands footage was gathered during the COVID-19 lockdown; a time when shared skies replaced shared spaces, and digital conversations substituted for missing embraces. Against this distance, the intimacy of mothering persisted, held close, while digital touch sought to bridge what could not be reached physically.
