The human hand’s ability to touch, display, gesture, and manipulate materials forms the core of Coming to Grips, Juan Ortiz-Apuy’s current installation at YYZ Artists’ Outlet in Toronto. Via a diverse selection of objects, all made by the Canadian-Costa Rican artist and arranged to create a host of illuminating juxtapositions, the installation urges us to reconsider how we know the world and how the world knows us. A History of an Object in 100 Years in 185 Seconds, a 16-millimeter film composed of images drawn from a century’s worth of National Geographic magazines, contributes to and extends this process. The cadent stream of hands measuring, inspecting, and presenting specimens also calls attention to an approach imbued with exoticness and voyeurism.
John Gayer: The multiplicity of forms in Coming to Grips reminded me that there are reciprocal relationships between our bodies and the world, in terms of what we build and what we relate to our bodies. Reciprocal relationships must inform your thinking.
Juan Ortiz-Apuy: Very much so. Our hands are a tangible mediator between us and the world. Richard Sennett, in his chapter on hands in the book The Craftsman, talks of affordance and prehension. As I understand it, affordance relates to objects—a switch, for instance, that signals how to use something—whereas prehension denotes the body’s ability to anticipate that interaction. Just imagine reaching for a glass of water. You will notice that the hand curves to accommodate the shape of the glass. I’ve thought a lot about that gap where affordance and prehension exist.
JG: But recognizing a switch, I believe, involves previous experience. Finding a switch in an unfamiliar space can be difficult.
JO-A: True. Much of that information is acquired through culture. Philosopher Georg Simmel, in his essay “The Handle,” speaks of handles shaping hands, hands shaping handles, and handles serving aesthetic purposes as well as practical ones.
JG: In that respect, a doorknob becomes something complex. Our hands not only predetermine its shape, but they also require consideration of placement and operation. I would say that the objects you’ve made really accentuate the workings of the hand.
JO-A: Each group of ceramics is dedicated to a specific gesture. One involves lifting with the index and middle fingers, pinching something up is the second one, and the motion of grabbing a teacup handle is the third. The metal rods used to display some of the objects also refer to hand gestures.
I spend a lot of time thinking about how we touch and handle things, and about the way that something stands. I really like the image of the baby donkey printed on silk, which hangs in the showcase at the gallery’s entrance. The tenderness of the hands that underpin the donkey’s hooves inspired me, and the metal rod supporting the banner mimics the position of the holder’s hands. Though the work is somewhat formal—thinking about touch, how something stands, and how to display something is an aspect of my work—it’s about presenting an object that viewers will contemplate.
The contextual things going on around an object—the lighting, the character of the space—also shape our impressions of it. You might see an object at 10 a.m., which will then seem to be a different object at 6 p.m. The illumination may have changed, or it’s seen in a different room. No object exists in a vacuum. Its context influences the nature of the experience.
JG: Those changes are unavoidable. I noticed that comparing my memories of moving through the installation to pictures on your website and those that I took with my phone produced some surprising differences. The nine compressed clay forms atop the vertical medal rods, in particular, seemed to keep changing. While circling them, one suddenly reminded me of a ribcage, another implied a semi-abstract face, and several appeared to delineate facial profiles.
JO-A: That is super interesting, because I didn’t think about them in that way. I wanted the forms to look organic. Some do recall body parts, and one resembles an ear. I was thinking about gesture as embodied language, a language of the body that would be intrinsic, or a possible archive of hand gestures. The works in the group were made during a ceramics residency that I did in Tallinn, Estonia. They are wood-fired and positioned over a base of rammed earth. I wanted the layers of the base to be exposed so people would see how that process contrasts with the clay I squeezed between my hands. One might assume the work alludes to environmental exploitation, that the desire to touch leads us into resource extraction.
JG: The visibility of the rammed earth structure, which reveals obvious differences in the layers’ color and texture, also reminds us that materials are touching other materials.
JO-A: Yes. I wanted to see a shift in scale at that point.
JG: And what did you use for the other base? Is it hollow like the vessels placed on it?
JO-A: It consists of an inner plywood core that was coated in plaster. Moving the material across that surface also generated thoughts about it being a kind of language. Things like: What is the difference between a pinch, a poke, a grab, or a squeeze? And how do these things—the ways we touch—matter?
Much of the inspiration for this project derived from the Mimosa pudica, a delicate plant native to Central and South America that I grew up with. In Spanish, we call them dormilonas (“sleepy ones”). They are found in very humid areas, such as the Costa Rican rainforest. During the summer, I lead a project called Learning from the Cloud Rainforest. It’s a field art school where I and students from Canada spend a few weeks learning things from the jungle. The Mimosa pudica is an incredible plant in some ways. Its behavior—the way its leaves pull away or fold up when touched—makes it seem shy or awkward. That sensitivity is one thing that I have been researching.
JG: The title of your installation, Coming to Grips, seems very appropriate to the variety embodied within the project, since the expression can refer to situations that may be physical, psychological, or emotional in nature.
JO-A: Exactly. “Grasp” is another word I’m fond of, since it means to literally take hold of something, but also to comprehend. Since touch is one way of understanding the world, I am interested in the relationship between these aspects. There is an amazing amount of information that we can decode through tactile experiences. Today, unfortunately, the tactile has been relegated to fingers swiping across screens. As a sculptor, I feel that the nuances of what can be absorbed through touch are worth highlighting.
JG: I am impressed with the quality of your ceramics. Have you been making clay sculpture for a long time?
JO-A: Actually, ceramics is a relatively recent undertaking. I taught myself a bit, but I have also attended many residencies where I learn various new skills. Learning is why I go the studio. Every project offers the opportunity to learn something new, whether it’s technical, conceptual, or historical.
JG: Making the ceramic vessels appears to have been difficult.
JO-A: They were hand-built and presented challenges. I wanted to create objects that have a unique power, that would be arresting in some way. I think that can happen in a combination of ways, but primarily through form, color, and texture. Some objects do that for me. I collect objects that I find in flea markets and elsewhere. Every now and then, I find one that conveys the weirdness of objects to me, that proposes we can never fully understand what an object is. Here, my goal was to create objects so removed from me that they have their own agency.
JG: I feel that the idea for this installation didn’t suddenly crystalize but grew out of various interests and curiosities.
JO-A: Though it’s not a large installation, I have been working on it for about a year and a half. I remember visiting the Museo del Jade, a new archaeological museum in San José, Costa Rica’s capital, where I saw some incredible pre-Columbian artifacts. They conveyed a sense of magic, animism, and power that is hard to describe, which made me want to approximate those qualities in my work.
JG: Your ceramic vessels are delightfully contradictory. Some are erotic, the presence of handles implies functionality, and, yet, the number, the style, and/or their positions are absurd.
JO-A: They embody this performativity aspect—handling them would involve unconventional movements—and there is a nod to commodity fetishism. The latter may entail some magical power or a sexual investment in the object. Material culture today straddles the two.
JG: I’d like to run something by you. In the publication “Assets,” a project that grew out of Irish artist David Beattie’s research into ways that the human hand interfaces with digital technologies, Beattie included these words from Jean-Paul Sartre: “Objects should not touch because they are not alive. You use them, put them back in place, you live among them: they are useful, nothing more. But they touch me, it is unbearable.”
JO-A: That’s a really good quotation. What I like about it is that it urges you to appreciate things or have a respect for things. I think it’s the opposite of consumerism or the way we approach mass reproduction. I feel that if we were able to appreciate things more deeply, as strange as they are, it would be harder for us to discard them. They would not end up in landfills or be seen floating in the ocean. That respect and appreciation for the agency of things would have environmental significance.
“Juan Ortiz-Apuy: Coming to Grips” is on view at YYZ Artists’ Outlet in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, through December 6, 2025.
