What the Hand Remembers is a group exhibition bringing together four artists whose practices focus on making as a way of holding knowledge.
Working across sculpture, installation, painting, photography, sound and participatory practice, the exhibition looks at how memory is carried through touch, repetition, labour and ritual rather than through written records alone. At a moment when knowledge is increasingly mediated through screens and records, the exhibition returns attention to what is learned and carried through the body.
This exhibition treats textile and fibre-based materials not as decorative or symbolic objects, but as working surfaces shaped by use. Across the works, materials are stretched, handled, repaired, marked, and worn. Burlap pulled under tension, surfaces shaped through devotional gesture, archival textiles activated through sound, and installations formed through shared presence point to memory as something that changes through contact. The exhibition asks what the hand remembers over time and what is lost, altered, or interrupted through acts of making.
What the Hand Remembers launches from 6:30 pm until 8 pm on Monday, 26 January at Patrick Studios, LS9 7EH.
The exhibition will be open Tuesday, 27 January, until 13 February:
10 am until 4 pm Tuesday to Thursday
12 pm until 5 pm Saturday and Sunday
Artists:
Farwa Rizvi
Farwa Rizvi’s practice explores contemporary expressions of faith, memory and identity through material experimentation rooted in historical and diasporic contexts. Working across painting, photography, mixed media, and fabric installation, her work revisits ritual, gesture, and symbolism as evolving practices rather than fixed traditions. Positioned between Pakistan and the UK, Rizvi examines how belief systems, cultural memory, and embodied rituals transform across borders. Her work frames faith as lived experience held within objects, surfaces, and repeated actions, creating a dialogue between the sacred and the everyday, the past and the present.
Find Farwa:
Website: farwarizvii.com Instagram: @farwa_rizvii
Alice Boot
Alice Boot works with fibre as a site of tension, resistance, and vulnerability. Through laborious processes of deconstructing and reconstructing burlap, combined with found materials such as metal, ceramic, and wood, Boot creates sculptural forms that oscillate between fragility and force. Their practice is grounded in touch and physical labour, drawing from coastal landscapes and the material decay shaped by natural forces. By forcing soft fibre into dialogue with rigid, damaged objects, Boot explores entanglement, endurance, and the unstable balance between destruction and care.
Find Alice:
Instagram: @a.boot_art
Laura Joan Smith
Laura Joan Smith’s practice investigates memory, collecting, and personal archives through mapping, sound, and material research. Working with found objects, recorded audio, and archival methodologies, Smith examines how memories can be preserved, categorised, and reactivated. Her work often blurs the boundaries between personal and collective memory, inviting audiences to listen and engage with collected narratives. Within What the hand remembers, Smith’s practice anchors the exhibition’s interest in documentation and the ways meaning accumulates through acts of gathering and recording.
Find Laura:
Website: laurajoansmith.weebly.com | Instagram: @laurajoansmith
Saba Siddiqui
Saba Siddiqui’s multimedia practice centres the lived experiences of Global Majority communities in the UK, exploring notions of home, identity, and belonging through immersive installation. Drawing from theatre set design, film, and social research, her work is characterised by bold colour, pattern, texture, and sensory engagement. Siddiqui’s practice is deeply informed by her commitment to decolonial methodologies, accessibility, and relational aesthetics, often incorporating collaborative and community-led processes. Her installations function as spaces of encounter which invite participation, dialogue and shared reflection while foregrounding underrepresented narratives within cultural institutions.
Find Saba:
Instagram: @sabasiddiqui_art
More about What the Hand Remembers:
Rather than framing textile practice through craft or sustainability, What the Hand Remembers positions material work as a way of thinking through questions of belief, displacement, care, and belonging. Faith appears in the exhibition as practice rather than doctrine, embedded in repeated actions and everyday gestures. Memory is approached as something active and ongoing, shaped by bodies and environments rather than fixed in the past.
Each artist contributes a distinct approach to material knowledge. Some practices focus on resistance and strain, others on repetition, collecting, or shared authorship. These differences are not resolved into a single narrative. Instead, the exhibition allows the works to sit alongside one another, creating space for overlap, contrast and dialogue around how meaning is carried through material processes.
Spatially, the exhibition is designed as a space that can shift over time. Certain elements remain open to handling, listening, or reconfiguration, allowing traces of use to remain visible. Viewers are invited to spend time with the works, to listen, touch, or contribute where appropriate, becoming temporary participants in an ongoing process rather than detached observers.
Developed through conversations between the artists, What the Hand Remembers brings together shared concerns around material practice while respecting the different contexts and methods each artist works within. The exhibition proposes the hand as a site where knowledge is learned, repeated, and passed on even when those gestures change, wear down, or cannot be fully preserved.
What the Hand Remembers is a collaboration between East Street Arts with Shazia Bibi, and Farwa Rizvi, Alice Boot, Laura Joan Smith, Saba Siddiqui.
