Touch Assignment

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Texture Quilt
Plastic, cotton fabric, paper, gauze, grip tape, cardboard, human hair, foil wrappers, facemask, wax coated paper, and thread
11"x 9"

"After all, our palette of feelings through touch is more elaborate than just hot, cold, pain, and pressure. Many touch receptors combine to produce what we call a twinge. Consider all the varieties of pain, irritation, abrasion; all the textures of lick, pat, wipe, fondle, knead; all the prickling, bruising, tingling, brushing, scratching, banging, fumbling, kissing, nudging." 
Natural History of the Senses, Ackerman, page 80

    This piece was mostly inspired by the complexity that surrounds the sense of touch. While temperature and pressure levels influence our reception of certain objects that we interact with, there are much more subtle details we pick up on, as Ackerman explains.  I wanted to create a piece which puts the level of sensitivity that the sense of touch possesses on display.  The piece features several different scraps of items including wad of hair taken from a hair brush, a piece of fabric from a cropped t-shirt, and the inside layer of a piece of cardboard. Additional items stitched together include a pop-tart wrapper and the seal from a container of cashews, both of which are foil, though have drastically different textures due to their sturdiness, a detail which is not necessarily detectable by sight, or any other sense aside from touch.  I made some of the more abrasive materials like the gauze and grip tape are smaller in scale compared to other scraps of materials because they have more texture than the larger scraps like piece of ripped paper, or the face mask. 

 

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