Many years ago, my work associate Donna mentioned her concern about the impending loss of handwork as technology replaces the rough and tumble of varied implements and processes.
Together, we pondered the silent stream of changes entering our lives as computers, email, and digital operations began to arrive on our desks and doorsteps.
Would there be unexpected implications for our emotional, mental, and physical health? Would we lose our sense of touch? These days, we can add the potential impact of an electrical failure that could leave machines inoperable.
It’s interesting that the word “digital” is used to describe our computerized new world order. Digital it certainly is. But it’s hardly what I’d call handwork. Handwork requires a wide range of sensitive hand, palm, and digit skills that respond to an equally vast range of physical and mental activities.
Try pressing palms against tree bark to feel unexpected differences in natural surface temperatures. Gently brush fingertips through crisp fall leaves, or attempt to remove a prickly pear cactus spear from your sock. The magnitude of rich sensory experience our hands provide is thanks to one of our most critical senses: touch.
Flint-napped stone tools found on West Coast beaches. Watercolour study by Dianne Bersea.
A 2017 study at the University of California-San Diego reported on “The amazing sensitivity of human touch.” The researchers explored the ancient importance of touch receptors that process skin sensations, and commented on the long period of evolutionary time required to produce the precise blueprint needed to sense and respond to physical surfaces, whether a baby’s skin or the rough physicality of stone, wood, or earth.
The tactile experience
Post-COVID, more of us are out walking, hiking, and gardening again. Perhaps we’re down on our knees, holding a tender plant we started in a boot-room window, now carefully introduced to the soil outside, in the tactile experience of planting and yard work. In anything but mechanized agriculture, that can mean carefully counting precious seeds into the palm of my hand or serious labour with fingers clamped around a shovel handle.
On the other hand, Donna’s anxiety about digital transitions references the conversion from metal typesetting to computer layout. This change involves more than just replacing physical, hand-involved processes with the flat, undifferentiated surfaces of the digital world. One of the first losses involves the skill and touch sensations that set special neuron synapses to their work.
In the late 1980s, annual reports were beginning to be digitally designed and printed. As a countermeasure, one inventive fellow created awards for documents that were reproduced and assembled by non-digital technology. I remember one financial report bound in burlap with board and batten binding. Amusing perhaps, but it invited touch and provided me with a tactile memory imprint.
Early flint-napped and shaped objects found on West Coast beaches. Watercolour study by Dianne Bersea.
I had a similar response to a restored hand-operated letterpress. My heart skipped a beat when I saw, felt, smelled, and heard the press in action. Noisy clanking and rattles accompanied an inked plate as it was brought into contact with handmade paper.
The printer grinned as he pulled the paper away and held it out to me. As I touched the indentations of the metal type scored right into the paper’s surface, I felt eerily and unexpectedly nostalgic. I realized I missed the creative hand-intensive manipulation of oils and inks, the smells and sounds of an old-fashioned printing shop. Perhaps even more, I missed the skills involved.
The hand of the artist
Our physically-impressible technologies have been around for a very long time, beginning with cuneiform marks pressed by hand-held stylus into soft clay tablets held in the palm of the hand. Add in wood block, silkscreen, lithography, etching, or simply pressing a painted leaf against a sheet of paper – all of which require creative, knowledgeable, attentive handwork. As an artist, I’m partial to the subtle grip and give of canvas as I bring a lightly grasped, loaded paintbrush into contact with my painting.
Over breakfast one morning, my partner Jodi contributed her thoughts on the dexterity and capabilities of hands. Pencil in hand, Jodi pondered the novelty of words in her crossword puzzle book. With mental acuity, creativity, and patience, she can usually solve word challenges quickly, although she says, “It would be so much faster to look this up on an iPhone.”
I could see Jodi’s eyes shift from the crossword puzzle to focus on her remembered wood-sculpting work, which at one time was the chief focus of Jodi’s creativity. It usually began with the splitting of a timber round with an axe and maul, then applying a well-sharpened hand adze to cut away additional wood.
Using finer and finer hand tools, which required a well-developed skill, the sculpting and carving would progress and expose the form within.
Renowned Tofino wood sculptor Henry Nola shared wood carving knowledge with every eager visitor to his famous Chesterman Beach carving shed. Here instructing novice carver Jodi Forster. | Photo by Dianne Bersea
Eons of knowledge
I am fascinated with handwork and the range of hand operated tools, implements, utensils, gadgets, and gizmos that have made life possible since the human form evolved. That’s a startling period of handwork encompassing more than 2.5 million years. By my reckoning, Gutenberg’s printing press mechanization and digital processes account for less than six hundred years of our human experience.
This suggests an incredible bank of handwork knowledge enduring in the hands of our predecessors of eons ago, or among those only a generation two behind us, and especially among our Indigenous neighbours who work hard to maintain hand skill and knowledge.
Thankfully, hand skills are still practiced, especially in the creative and natural arts; from painting to planting, food preparation to music. All we require are the tools and incentive to maintain, retrain, re-apply, and rebuild simple hand operated solutions for positive well-being.
Dianne Bersea has been a professional artist for more than 35 years, with creative beginnings in the wild places of Canada’s westernmost province. She lives in Penticton, BC. www.diannebersea.com
