HANDS community mural

In February 2025 Ball and Socket Arts asked me and Dan Gries to make a mural for their Artcade. As we worked on it, Rita Lombardi contributed so much (including the source images: her photographs, of her hands) that we made her a full partner in the project. Six months later, over 80 volunteers came together in Cheshire to paint more than 34,000 dots in ten hours across nine 4’x8’ plywood boards. Almost none of them knew what the image was while they were working on it.

Here is our artist statement for HANDS.

Our world is increasingly machine-built, and our experience of it is more mediated by computers and artificial intelligence, but HANDS is a digital image manually painted by volunteers standing next to each other.

No AI was used to make HANDS. The artists used custom code and standard algorithms for color-clustering and half-toning to translate their photograph into a four-color palette on a hexagonal grid. They also designed and code-generated maps for volunteers to translate the image onto the boards.

With these maps, a hex-grid stencil, and a little coaching, people who had never met before collaborated (co-labored) to quickly paint 34,517 dots into a 288 square-foot painting. Many described it as meditative, like a flow state. Almost none of them knew what the image was while they were painting it.

From 20 feet away the viewer sees a clearly resolved, photographic image: two hands reaching for each other. It looks machine-printed, but as the viewer approaches, they begin to see that the image is made of hand-painted dots, each bearing the signature of its maker – a swirl, a swish, lighter, darker – no two dots are identical.

HANDS explores a different balance of machine power and people power: one that invites strangers to work together, one that celebrates the human touch.

The space for the mural is a long hallway with bay doors that open onto the parking lot. The posts between the doors obstruct the view of the mural, something we considered as we searched for what the image would be. Once we settled on the image, we used mockups to make sure we liked the way the bay doors would frame it.

As you move towards the mural, through the doors, you can finally see it unobstructed, but only at a sharp angle.

We wanted to play more with the angles. We hope a future muralist will do something more interesting with them than we did.

Here’s the clearest whole view of the mural - in the Ball & Socket warehouse, after it was completed, before it was installed:

We had everyone who worked on the mural, from beginning to end, sign the bottom of panel 9.