The thing that first drew me to mordançage was the idea that I could take something stagnant, like a film photography print, and essentially put it into motion.

I started thinking about the things in our lives that are always in motion, and I kept coming back to our hands. They’re constantly at work. Creating, shaping, building, typing, washing, repairing, holding. Even when we’re still, our hands rarely are.

We knead dough today so we can eat tomorrow. We write a note today to send our love tomorrow. We chop wood today so we can build a fire tomorrow. We press a shutter today so we can remember this moment tomorrow.

There’s an invisible energy in that constant motion; in the small, repetitive tasks that quietly move us forward. The hidden parts of our labor. The building blocks of what we can’t yet see, but will one day hold.

I created this piece with that seemingly mundane, constantly in motion energy in mind. What if we could capture that energy and hold it? What if we could see the shape it takes as it moves from one task to another? What if we could see the shape of the energy we emit from our hands when we’re doing something we love?

As water shifted the veils, reshaping the patterns around the hands, we were able to capture a few fleeting moments where something that usually remains unseen became visible; a glimpse of the energy our hands are constantly, and quietly, releasing into the world.

This print is the first in a series that we created with this concept in mind.