Touch Response

Beach Carnivore
Digital collage using a hand drawn illustration and personal photograph
Physical illustration is 12" x 9"

"Men with thick mats of hair on their shoulders and backs used to scare me. A word like 'carnivore' would form in my mind when I passed them on beaches."

Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses, page 87

Artist statement:

When I read this line, I was instantly intrigued by the imagery of it. Of course there was never an actual bear on the beach and hairy men are nothing to be afraid of, but as Diane Ackerman shows, to a child anything you're not used to can seem shocking and sometimes even scary. I wanted to capture how a young Diane might have felt in this situation, and to represent how children see (and touch) the world, in all of its fantastical exaggeration.

Touch Receptors in the Morning
Edited photographs
Each is 4" x 3"; full piece measures 14" x 7"

"After a while, as suggested, a touch receptor 'adapts' to the stimuli and stops responding, which is just as well or we would be driven crazy by the feel of a light sweater against the skin on a cool summer's evening, or go berserk if a breeze didn't quit. . . . the [touch] receptors, so alert at first, so hungry for novelty, after a while say the electrical equivalent of 'Oh, that again,' and begin to doze, so we can get on with life."

Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses, pages 81-82

Artist statement:
This concept is fascinating to me. I love how not only can touch receptors learn to "ignore" something like a sweater, but once you start thinking about it, you can suddenly become conscious of that sweater all over again. For the piece, I wanted to show how this feels and works in one's body through the universal human experience of getting ready in the morning. I used grayscale as well as red, an attention-grabbing color, to highlight the areas that I would feel touching me while getting ready. Starting with a bright red when it's new and fading to a less intense red before turning back into gray, this is meant to mirror how the touch receptors notice a new sensation but then let it fade so we can direct our attention elsewhere.

Individual pictures from response #2 in a bigger size are below.