Hands on

What you’ll notice first in the portraits by Lisa Wood on view now at the School of Art Gallery at the University of Manitoba are not the subjects’ faces, but their hands.

Gesticulating hands, reaching hands, hands covering a mouth. Tattooed hands. Hands attached to wrists wrapped with friendship bracelets and smartwatches, tracking thousands of steps logged over hundreds of shifts. Hands that perform labour.

“I love painting hands,” the Brandon-based visual artist says. “I think that when a viewer sees faces, they’re thinking about that particular person, but when a viewer sees hands, they’re personal, but I think that we can connect more or think more about ourselves when we’re seeing somebody else’s hands.”

The paintings are part of a suite of works that compose SHIFT/WORK: Portraits of Precarity, a multimedia research-creation project that shares the experiences of rural Manitobans navigating precarious work — whether that’s insecure, short-term or contract-based employment — created from more than two years of research.

SHIFT/WORK is, in every sense, a group project, developed in collaboration with counselling psychologist Breanna Lawrence from the University of Victoria and rural health geographer Rachel Herron from Brandon University. Wood also had artistic contributors in artist research assistants Renata Truelove, Michael Vachon and Dhairya Vaidya, and guest writers Chelsey Campbell and Kerri-Lynn Reeves contributed to the exhibition’s brochure.

The seeds for the project were planted several years ago. Wood and Lawrence, who are friends, were both considering projects about labour.

Lawrence was thinking about the psychology of working; Wood was thinking about labour through the lens of art. At the time, they were coming out of navigating a pandemic with kids in the same grade.

“So, you know, work and motherhood and the collapse of society came together,” Wood says with a laugh.

“And so, we started talking about what kind of a project we could do together, and thinking about precarious work and the way that research creation might be able to describe the experiences of precarious work.”

The resulting artworks are not illustrations of research and data. They are intimate, detailed portraits — rendered in many different mediums, including layered paintings, sculptural creations, sound collages and narrative drawings — which allow people to engage with the subject of precarious work differently than they might through an academic text.

“What was so done so masterfully in the research creation, is they did all this research about why precarious labour is existing, why it’s a problem right now, what are the kind of underlying political structures that are increasing precarious labour, but then Lisa makes it visible in a way that is relatable to the viewer,” says Derek Dunlop, director of the School of Art Gallery.

“So, there’s more of an empathic relationship between the viewer and the artwork. And the students are engaging with it too. They all have their own experiences with precarious labour.”

The artworks were created in stages.

Over the span of two weeks, participants were prompted four times a day to respond to questions around their working conditions, their mental health or family. The three artist research assistants were then tasked with making artwork specifically from their responses.

Participants then shared their experiences in recorded interviews, both audio and video; Wood was able to base her figurative works on video stills. The resulting works are layered and kinetic, not static.

“Working with recorded video has been super interesting for me, because in the past I would work with bursts of photos, so you’re working with luck of the draw, whatever happens to get captured. But now, I’m able to look at a full expression of a gesture, or the way people will move from one kind of idea into another idea, and the ways that their bodies change, or their facial expressions change as they’re thinking about different things,” she says.

Wood and her artist research assistants also experimented with shredding copies of their original drawings and weaving the paper ribbons into new sculptural works, which now accompany the paintings in the show.

“That little idea got us thinking about how weaving and shredding and reassembling really reflected a lot about people’s experiences of compartmentalization, being in different places at different times, having to switch really quickly between roles, all of these different entanglements, nets, things slipping through, things that are getting caught,” she says.

Precarity, as Wood says, “slices through every strata,” so the experiences here are varied. Getting people to open up about theirs required establishing a base of respect, openness and curiosity, she says.

“People, through the interviews, told me that they wanted their voices to be raised, that that’s why they were participating in this study. They didn’t feel like they had a platform, necessarily, and here one was being provided.”

And the participants were not just heard, but seen.

Wood recalls one participants’ reaction to her portrait, the kind of reaction an artist hopes to get.

“She was like, ‘That’s my life. That’s my whole life, right there.’”

SHIFT/WORK is on view until May 1.

» Winnipeg Free Press