TOUCH

Animals

"Touch is a powerfully important sense among animals, for whom the slightest touch of an object or another animal triggers responses. One needs only watch [...] the courting of two giraffes thwacking their long necks together." 

-Diane Ackerman

I chose the section "Animals" within Touch because I was curious to see how they were related. Reading this, many things were pointed out to me as to what touch did for different species. To relate to this, I decided to create touching or thwacking giraffes with paper to represent what the quote says from a visual standpoint. Holding them together with ribbon was a mostly aesthetic choice I made in order to both add color and keep their touching bond from being broken.

Speaking of Touch

"'Noli me Tangere, legal Latin for don't meddle or interfer'" translates literally to 'Don't touch me'. [...] When we die, loved ones swaddle us in heavily padded coffins, making us infants again, lying in our mother's arms before returning to the womb of the earth, ceremonially unborn."

-Diane Ackerman

The two things that marked me the most in the section "Speaking of Touch" were the above quotes, one being a known quote that Jesus said to Mary Magdalen after his resurrection and the other being a very deep view of why we are buried in coffins after our demise. I chose to represent these together because a man came back to life and told his presumed wife not to touch him, yet in death, there is nothing I can imagine wanting more than to be hugged once more by someone I loved.