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    JR’s Tree of 10,000 Hands Takes Root in a Former Montpellier Church

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    JR’s Tree of 10,000 Hands Takes Root in a Former Montpellier Church

    July 9, 2025

    Art

    Grace Ebert

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    Known for his large-scale participatory art projects, French artist JR has embarked on a new project that breathes life into a historic venue. A tree of 10,000 scanned and printed hands has sprouted in Carré Sainte-Anne, a Catholic church built in 1869 in the largely Protestant city of Montpellier as a call for unity. The venue in the south of France became an art center in 1991 and just recently reopened following seven years of renovations.

    JR’s exhibition Adventice is the first commission in the revitalized space and takes its name from the Latin “ad venire,” which translates to “come from outside.” In botanical terms, the word often refers to weeds and specimens that spring up where they had not been intentionally planted.

    Montpellier’s landscape is a direct result of travelers, trade, and the proliferation of opportunistic plants, according to Carré Sainte-Anne:

    When the first drapery mills appeared along the banks of the Lez in the Middle Ages, unidentified flora started growing here and there. Fleece imported from Spain, North Africa, Constantinople, and Smyrna was washed in the waters, releasing these seeds from faraway lands, which grew thanks to the fertile conditions of the Mediterranean river.

    Today, French gardens and landscapes pride themselves on the beauty of such diverse species living in harmony.

    Always interested in drawing connections between individuals and broader social issues, JR draws on this history and contemporary issues of migration and displacement. Adventice suspends 10,000 hands from people within the local community and includes smaller wall works with similar depictions.

    Set among the cavernous neo-Gothic architecture and stained-glass windows, the monumental installation celebrates the multitude of people necessary for an ecosystem to thrive. Each hand is presented as both a leaf and a seed, a sign of life and vitality and the essential component in the tree’s future.

    Adventice will be on view through December 7, and visitors can contribute their hands to the work throughout the run of the exhibition.

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    • 113 Shares169 Views

      in Art

      Clementine Keith-Roach Unearths Ancient Vessels for Her Motherly Sculptures

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      “Eternal return” (2024), terracotta vessel, plaster, wood, steel, resin clay modeling paste, and acrylic paint, 23 5/8 x 42 1/2 x 37 3/4 inches. Photo by Damian Griffiths

      Clementine Keith-Roach Unearths Ancient Vessels for Her Motherly Sculptures

      November 17, 2024

      Art

      Grace Ebert

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      From her studio in Dorset, Clementine Keith-Roach sculpts expressive, bodily forms that appear as if plucked from an ancient cavern or soot-filled cellar.

      The terracotta works feature fragments of weathered limbs that crisscross and grasp fingers around hand-built vessels. Dents, cracks, and white patina mark the surfaces of each domestic object and trace their histories and former uses.

      “I is another” (2024), terracotta vessel, plaster and resin composite, wood, steel, resin clay,modeling paste, and acrylic paint, 20 1/2 x 58 1/4 x 29 7/8 inches. Photo by Damian Griffiths

      In a conversation with Colossal, Keith-Roach frequently references themes of nurturing and communal responsibility and the roles she sees those values playing in a world that strives more earnestly for equality and care. What if we saw mothering as a metaphor, she asks?

      The transformative nature of pregnancy, the ways bodies merge, and a mandate of care figure prominently in the artist’s practice. When she became a mother herself, she felt “broken apart,” both psychologically and physically as she responded to the needs of the baby.

      This severing between mind and body remains in Keith-Roach’s work, as nude, headless chests buttress a wide, sloping bowl in “Eternal return,” for example. Although she currently enjoys leaving the vessels empty, milk would fill the basins in some of her earlier pieces, directly invoking motherhood.

      Keith-Roach refers to her new works—which are on view at PPOW in New York—as “statues,” although she complicates the idea that monuments deify singular people, often men with imperial inclinations. Instead, her sculptures remain anonymous and contain several pairs of hands or limbs that, often literally, elevate a central object.

      “A statue boils down to a representation of an individual. Even if they’re the most extraordinary person, they’re born out of a social moment,” the artist adds. “An individual is never isolated. They’re born out of a kind of collective moment.”

      Detail of “I is another” (2024), terracotta vessel, plaster and resin composite, wood, steel, resin clay,modeling paste, and acrylic paint, 20 1/2 x 58 1/4 x 29 7/8 inches. Photo by Damian Griffiths

      At the center of each work is an antique terracotta amphora the artist sources from second-hand shops and markets. Plaster casts of her own body and those of her friends create a series of detached limbs that, despite retaining the distinctive wrinkles and shapes of a particular person, are unidentifiable as they cradle or reach across the vessel.

      For some sculptures, Keith-Roach wanted to have the bodies merge before they were pulled from the cast. When creating “Herm,” for example, she asked her subjects to stand tightly together, allowing their skin to touch so she could create one form from two figures. In many works, she says, “a multitude of people becomes one mass.”

      Once she fuses the body parts to the anchoring amphora, Keith-Roach embarks on a deceptive trompe l’oeil process, in which she paints and conditions the new additions to mimic the patinaed surfaces of the older components. In the completed sculptures, there’s tension between the body’s inevitable decay and the timeless durability of ceramic, which the artist celebrates:

      My works have this sacred quality to them. There’s raising the domestic vessel up, transforming it into something ceremonial. It’s taking it out of the everyday and making it into an object of reflection. It’s the same with the body parts. It’s looking at these movements and gestures and things we do every day and monumentalizing them. It’s monumentalizing the everyday.

      Keith-Roach’s solo exhibition New Statue is on view through December 21. You can find more of her work on Instagram.

      “No one” (2024), terracotta vessel, plaster, wood, steel, resin clay modeling paste, and acrylic paint, 18 7/8 x 23 5/8 x 29 1/2 inches. Photo by Damian Griffiths

      “Eternal return” (2024), terracotta vessel, plaster, wood, steel, resin clay modeling paste, and acrylic paint, 23 5/8 x 42 1/2 x 37 3/4 inches. Photo by Damian Griffiths

      “Herm” (2024), terracotta vessel, plaster, wood, steel, resin clay modeling paste, and acrylic paint, 50 x 20 1/8 x 20 7/8 inches. Photo by Damian Griffiths

      “works and days 2” (2024), plaster, resin clay, paint, 17 7/8 x 17 7/8 x 4 3/8 inches. Photo by Damian Griffiths

      Detail of “works and days 2” (2024), plaster, resin clay, paint, 17 7/8 x 17 7/8 x 4 3/8 inches. Photo by Damian Griffiths

      “works and days 1” (2024), plaster, resin clay, paint, 18 7/8 x 17 7/8 x 5 1/8 inches. Photo by Damian Griffiths

      Detail of “works and days 1” (2024), plaster, resin clay, paint, 18 7/8 x 17 7/8 x 5 1/8 inches. Photo by Damian Griffiths

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    • 225 Shares199 Views

      in Art

      Archaeologists Uncover Children’s Hand and Foot Prints in What’s Thought to Be the Oldest Cave Art To Date

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      Art
      History

      #art history
      #cave art
      #feet
      #hands
      #kids

      September 16, 2021
      Grace Ebert

      Image via Science Bulletin
      A series of hand and foot impressions uncovered in the Quesang village in the Tibetan Plateau might rewrite the art-historical timeline. According to an article published this month in Science Bulletin, researchers believe the ancient prints were made between 169,000 and 226,000 years ago and appear to be placed intentionally, cementing the notion that they’re the earliest examples of cave art yet to be uncovered. 
      Of course, there’s plenty of debate over whether these impressions are art, although archaeologists arguing for the categorization are staking their claims on intent. “​It is the composition, which is deliberate, the fact the traces were not made by normal locomotion, and the care taken so that one trace does not overlap the next,” geologist Matthew Bennett told Gizmodo, rejecting the idea that the prints are a byproduct of common movement like walking or grasping nearby material for stabilization. If the impressions are considered art, they predate the prehistoric figurative findings in both Sulawesi and Lasceaux, which date back about 43,900 and 17,000 years, respectively.
      Fossilized on a piece of limestone called travertine, the size and variances of the prints also indicate that they were made by two children. Archaeologists theorize that the indentations, which include five feet and five hands, were placed in mud near the Quesang Hot Spring before it compacted under pressure, or lithified, preserving the duo’s pieces in the hardened material for millennia. Although the research team isn’t sure that the creators were Homo sapiens—the timeline also aligns with the Denisovans, an extinct species from the hominin group that primarily occupied what’s now Asia—if they were, they were likely 7 and 12 years old.

      #art history
      #cave art
      #feet
      #hands
      #kids

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    • 175 Shares199 Views

      in Art

      Plants Embedded in Wax Sprout from Fragile Hands in Memory-Infused Works by Valerie Hammond

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      Art

      #encaustic
      #flowers
      #hands
      #memory
      #plants
      #wax

      March 2, 2021
      Grace Ebert

      All images © Valerie Hammond, shared with permission
      In Valerie Hammond’s series of wax drawings, protection is two-fold: the artist (previously) encases dried flowers and ferns in a thin layer of wax, preserving their fragile tissues long after they’ve been plucked from the ground. In outlining a pair of hands, she also secures a memory, or rather, “the essence of a gesture and the fleeting moment in which it was made.”
      Centered on limbs lying flat on Japanese paper, the ongoing series dates back to the 1990s, when Hammond made the first tracing “partly in response to the death of a dear friend, whose beautiful hands I often found myself remembering.” She continued by working with family and friends, mainly women and children, to delineate their wrists, palms, and fingers. Today, the series features dozens of works that are comprised of either hands tethered to the dried botanics, which sprout outward in wispy tendrils, or others overlayed with thread and glass beads.
      Although the delicate pieces began as a simple trace, Hammond shares that she soon began to overlay the original drawing with pressed florals, creating encaustic assemblages that “echoed the body’s bones, veins, and circulatory systems.” She continued to experiment with the series by introducing various techniques, including printmaking, Xerox transfers, and finally Photoshop inversions, that distorted the original rendering and shifted her practice. Hammond explains:
      The works suddenly inhabited a space I had been searching for, straddling the indefinable boundary between presence and absence, material and immaterial, consciousness and the unconscious. For me, they became emblematic not only of the people whose hands I had traced but of my own evolving artistic process—testimony to the passing of time and the quiet dissolution of memory.
      Hammond’s work recently was included in a group show at Leila Heller Gallery. Her practice spans multiple mediums including collage, drawing, and sculpture, all of which you can explore on her site and Instagram.

      #encaustic
      #flowers
      #hands
      #memory
      #plants
      #wax

      Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member and support independent arts publishing. Join a community of like-minded readers who are passionate about contemporary art, help support our interview series, gain access to partner discounts, and much more. Join now!

       
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