Reaching The images in “Reaching” are an expression of longing and offering. I grew up in a house where dinner table conversation was often about maimed limbs, medical wonders, and human frailty.  My father lost a finger on his non-dominant hand in the Korean War and had many operations to make his hand appear “normal.”  My mother was an occupational therapist who eventually specialized in hand therapy and as you may guess, was preoccupied with human hands as a marvel of mechanics.  She did not have much patience for neediness in the able-bodied though.  I came to understand hands and arms as both healing and hurting.  As a way of making sense of the contradictions I grew up with, I learned to appreciate the fine line between what is comic and what is tragic.  These images are made using film and limbs I found in a basket in an antique store in the Midwest.  While there is nothing but tragedy in the loss of an actual limb, finding a basket full of amputated doll arms is at least a bit absurd. I am working with the lost limbs to express the complicated relationship we have with our hands as human biological tools.  We use hands to communicate and connect with each other through gesture, touch, pleasure and pain – even when we don’t share a common spoken language, we “talk” to each other