Examining Touch and Haptic Perception in my Practice
Haptic, from the Greek haptikos, meaning to able to come into contact with, to touch, to grasp or to fasten. The word haptic first appeared in the English translation of a Latin mathematical text by Isaac Barrow in 1734; the term haptics in a 1734 edition and haptic in an 1860 version by William Whewell. In this context, Haptics is a science of touch, akin to optics, acoustics and olfaction.
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The science of haptics is a less-studied field, perhaps because it is not localised within the body, the body is touch, enmeshed in receptive tissue. The receptive systems of the body are just the beginning of the broad construct known as 'haptics'. Haptic psychology examines the neural processes of haptic perception, including how the brain interprets stimuli such as temperature, texture, pressure, pain and pleasure; not only how the body perceives but the way it reacts, physically, emotionally and socially. Touch is the relation between body and world; between subjective and objective; between the self and an other. In this sense, the haptic is profoundly phenomenological, with key philosophers including Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Derrida, examining touch and haptics as key constituents of existence and consciousness. The term haptics is now more widely used than ever before, with its reference to touch via technology; haptic devices which provide a touch interface between the user and device.​​
Isaac Barrow, The Usefulness of Mathematical Learning Explained and Demonstrated. 1734 edition
I previously wrote about a feeling of disconnect between myself (the body) and the object, the print. Not to say that I felt detached from the work, but that it seemed important for the body (my body?) to be present in the work. The time and freedom permitted on the course to be an artist, to make and to think, making often without conscious thought, is resulting in curiously bodily outcomes. The materials I am starting to use: semi-transparent silk prints, ink on Japanese paper, felt and silk fibres; in pink and blood red, they seem inspired by the aqueous membranes of the body. I wonder (and it seems strange to write this down) if some of it is about being a non-identical twin, the memory of pressing through a surface, aware of someone else near but separate, pressing through another surface. I think again of Paul Thek's description of the 'intransigent stuff of the body' and saying 'I work with it to detach myself from it'. For me, the body is there, fearful and intractable, but I am playing around the edges of it, borrowing some of its language.
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From examining phenomenology as the lived experience of the body, particularly its dynamic interrelationship with the world of objects, I have become interested in haptics as the interface between the subjective and objective, the self and the other. Reading 'On Touching - Jean Luc Nancy', I find Derrida's discourse on haptics to be rich in the language of form and materiality: the skin as a 'thin peel of limit', the concepts of 'pure smoothness' and 'feeling from the inside'. Also, the language of motion-perception: the object 'flexes, inflects, reflects (itself)'; 'tactility posing and deposing' and 'a consciousness reverberating in movements '. I can draw, construct and mould from this language because it is suggestive of and lends itself to processes, materials and forms.
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This idea of 'feeling from the inside' has been key to my recent practice, as it conceptualises the material qualities of my work and attunes to my instinctive way of working with transparency, layers and fleshy hues. In the essay Merleau-Ponty's Eye and Mind: Re-thinking the Visible, David Brubaker writes: 'Artists may want to symbolize this carnal thickness between thought and external things’, proceeding to locate the 'texture of the visible' within artworks; the ‘secret visibility of ones own body’. With this idea of experiencing touch both on the surface of and inside our bodies, I am interested in the material qualities of a surface which might be both felt through and viewed through.
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film stills, 2024
Installation views. Digital print on Pansion White paper, wax, wood, acrylic paint, magnets. 2025
One of my sculptural works for a group exhibition in Millbank Tower included a digital print on Japanese paper dipped in wax. The wax gives the print a skin-like surface whilst retaining the transparency of the fine paper. Here, I tried to gain a sense of touching through the body by creating a structure which would hold up the print as well as press-in from behind. The structure was constructed in the form of a hand, the wooden dowel sanded at each end so that it would sit level against the print, like touching finger-tips.
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Derrida writes that the hand has ‘phenomenological nobility’; its fingers are the point of contact, the finger tips the 'limits of touch'. I'm interested in creating works which seem to physically convey a concept, as in a scientific or architectural model; model-like in its open construction and sense of scale. The wax torso-print which also contains the surface of the high-rise Millbank Tower, is suggestive of haptic architecture and the body as it assimilates into its built surroundings.
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The shadowy 'touch' through a surface derived from an earlier installation in which a projection cast upwards through a grey, frosted surface, on which were placed small prints depicting religious relics. In the film, the moving image, my hand, was attempting to interact with the relic prints, though the hand seemed only to touch the screen itself. Reflecting on these works, I see a lot about the limits of touch, or, as Derrida quotes Nancy: 'to touch the limit', which rather locates touch at a limit or threshold, implying a surface which can't be breached.
Reverse view of sculpture, 2025
Digital photograph, 2025
Digital print on silk, 50 x 60cm. 2025
I often print onto semi-transparent materials such as Japanese paper, and, more recently, thin habotai silk. This allows me to create membrane-like surfaces which work when conceptualising the haptic sense of 'touching from the inside' and Derrida's 'flesh as the medium of touch'. In this particular image, there is an embryonic sense to the hand; the colour recalling light as it shines through flesh; the eerie red glow of a hand when a torch is shone directly through.
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The particular fluorescence I have created through digital editing has been inspired by this peculiar quality of light casting through the body, revealing its liquid semi-transparency. I have also been inspired by the Optograms (mouth camera) works which the artist Lindsay Seers created between 1997 and 2020. Seers' term Optogram references a belief in the Victorian period that images could become etched onto the retina at the point of death, particularly dramatic deaths. In 1876 Franz Boll, of the University of Rome, discovered a red pigment in a frog's retina which bleached when exposed to light. He called this substance visual purple or rhodopsin. A professor of physiology in Heidelberg, Willy Kühne, took this study further by restraining the head of an albino rabbit so that its eyes faced a barred window. Kühne then covered the rabbit's head with a black cloth for several minutes 'to let rhodopsin accumulate in the eye's rod's', then removed the cloth to re-expose the animal's eye for a further three minutes. At which point, the rabbit was decapitated, eye removed, retina sliced out and placed in a fixing solution. According to Seers' research, Kühne 'saw printed upon the retina in bleached and unaltered rhodopsin, a picture of the window with the clear pattern of its bars.' This research then led to the belief that the eyes of someone dead would hold the image of the last thing they had seen, and became so widespread that some police departments began taking close-up photographs of murder victims' eyes in the hope of identifying the perpetrator.
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The movement of the hand is tentative; it tests the surface. Merleau-Ponty writes about the role of motility in perception: 'it is not a consciousness becoming movement, but a consciousness reverberating in movements’. Consciousness is embodied with palpative movements; movements which are intentional, extending outwards and then drawing back in ('flexes, inflects, reflects'). Husserl describes this as 'kinaesthetic consciousness', subjectivity characterised in terms of free and responsive movement. As sculpture becomes more prominent in my work, very often prints becoming sculptures, I find that I want some sense of movement or active presence in the work. Recalling the moving image flickering on the edges of the prints in the installation, I also consider still images, perhaps so multi-layered or impressionistic that they seem to quiver, or a material so light that it moves; even transparency which gathers up the shadowy movement of people within or amongst the work.
Lindsay Seers, Senigallia 2. Photograph with mouth photo counterpart 14 x 12 inches
Lindsay Seers, Vampire. Photograph with mouth photo counterpart 14 x 12 inches
Digital print on silk, 50 x 60cm. 2025
Lindsay Seers' 'mouth camera' works were created by placing a light-sensitive paper in her mouth and using her lips as an aperture and shutter. These were often exhibited alongside a documentary photograph which was taken at the same time as she took her mouth photographs. They have this distinctive red because they are tinted by the light casting through the blood in her cheeks. The body becomes the eye; the mouth 'aperture' becomes the pupil. The circular photograph, like the divining retinal tissue, becomes a way for the artist to perceive from the inside. Further, we have the body as camera, the mechanical eye, which when fogged by the flesh of the artist's cheeks seems both optical and haptical. This is explored conceptually by Derrida in his text On Touching, when he writes of 'the eye that touches, like a finger or lips'. Similarly, Derrida cites the French writer Hélène Cixous, who writes that 'eyes are miraculous hands’ and even describes the ‘delicate tact of the cornea’.
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In extracting a 'material' language, I have been seeking a particular light-dependent hue and quality of translucence which feels like 'looking through' the body. As well as printing onto Japanese paper and silk, I have been experimenting with casting fingertip and palm objects into pigmented resin. Further designs involve creating larger objects from kiln-cast glass with the idea of the bodily lens, digital translucence, and concepts of 'pure smoothness' which Derrida also writes about in his work On Touching, which I will return to. The cast resin is photographed here on a white digital screen, playing materially with the idea of the the haptic interface and the touch screen
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Cast resin and pigment on digital screen (detail). 2025
Cast resin and pigment on digital screen. 2025
In my layered digital work, the hand is situated behind the grid-like facade of the tower block, recalling the conception of the image by pressing onto a screen, and giving the image a distinctly digital quality. The overlaid grid, traces of the exterior, works well to delineate the 'surface' of the screen, and becomes the source of the haptic interaction.
Earlier works examined palm-sized religious reliquaries in which the relic is held behind a glass window, often surrounded by paper or fabric ornamentation. In my prints and digital works, I was specifically interested in depicting or re-making these glass-fronted displays, which I called Relic Windows. In many, I simplified the ornamentation to sequins or glowing buttons which also resemble fingertips. In one experiment, I projected my hand film over the relic window so that the hand interacted with the 'button' objects in the photograph. The work, being about relic-touching, seemed to be referencing also the haptic screen, questioning the material and immaterial, as well as the idea of virtuality.
Digital photograph, 2025
Film projection on digital photograph, 2024
Relic Egg, aquatint on Somerset paper. 2025
In The Virtual Window, Anne Friedberg examines the window's properties to frame and delineate perspective, as well as its metaphorical, plural and overlapping usage in computers as the 'virtual' window. Friedberg writes: ‘The window reduces the outside to a two-dimensional surface; the window becomes a screen’. In creating images which reference the haptic, I have tended toward a touch which meets a surface; a membrane. The 'object' of the touch seems to be the liminal, the window or the screen. Friedberg also describes the window as a ‘membrane where surface meets depth, where transparency meets its barriers’. Here, Friedberg is describing the screen as the material of the virtual, the screen being the surface on which a virtual image begins to have its own 'liminal materiality'. The image exists in reality, but its materiality is 'liminal', it is just the skin or membrane of the thing, not the thing itself, which Friedberg calls 'a second-order materiality'.
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Friedberg's theory is central when we consider the photographic image; as Flusser writes in Towards a History of Photography, 'images are significant surfaces'. Derrida's phenomenological description of touch, drawing on the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, contains the idea of the surface as a haptic limit. Derrida writes that 'we can only touch on a surface, which is to say the skin or thin peel of a limit'. He proposes that touch is 'without contact', and writes: 'it does not carry out any fusion or identification, not even any immediate contiguity’. He continues: 'We have to dissociate any association of touch with immediacy. There is no continuity, no closeness or absolute proximity.' Derrida is not saying that touch is in any way virtual ; the act of touching is a physical act; flesh and object, flesh and flesh etc. However, the concept of the limit is revealed in the phrase 'without contiguity'; the limit is found in the insurpassable ontological distance between subject and object, between the self and other.
Peter Schwenger, in The Tears of Things: Melancholy and Physical Objects, cites Merleau-Ponty's conception of consciousness or rather self-consciousness. He writes: 'for a consciousness to have being it must apprehend that which is outside itself; its being must be being-in-the-world'. Schwenger takes Merleau-Ponty's premise that the object is necessary for the subject to be constituted, however, he writes, 'the body never reaches the object, and to this degree 'it loses not only the object but the subject'. I take this to mean that the object is resolutely other, and thus unattainable, untouchable. As for the subject, Merleau-Ponty writes that 'We fill our senses with appearances in order to blunt the always implicit sense that the things of this world are fundamentally distant from us’. Here, we have the idea of images, the virtual, having a 'liminal materiality', being mere surfaces onto which semblances of reality might be projected, but which may not be fully comprehended or embodied.
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Derrida's language is bound in material description when he considers the complexities of subject-object in relation to touch. Touch seeks continuity and contiguity: 'It is the smooth and not the striated space that this haptical continuism finds, or rather seeks its element of appropriation'. Derrida cites 'pure smoothness' as the ultimate ontological union of object and subject; a limitless 'haptical continuism' means absolute knowledge of an-other. For Derrida, quoting Merleau-Ponty, ‘absolute knowledge is not detachment, it is inherence’. This suggests touching to such an extent as to break through its limits, to push through ones own skin to merge, liquid-like with the object of apprehension; to become a part of it. Derrida writes: 'There is never any pure, immediate experience of the continuous, nor of closeness, nor of absolute proximity. Where has experience ever encountered (perceived, seen touched, heard, tasted, felt) the purely smooth?'.
Derrida answers this himself by writing: ‘Pure smoothness is the end of everything, death itself’. I take this to mean the desire to shut off from ones own subjectivity, as Freud describes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, ‘the instinct to return to the inanimate state’, in other words, the desire to be an object'.
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In my practice, I am interested in this distinction between the ambiguous, fragmented, peripheral, often abject experience of the subject and the status of the object in its solid completeness. I am particularly intrigued by the liminal state between subject and object, and the de-stabilising, disconnecting effects that this ambiguity can reveal. As I begin to pull fragments of my practice into a coherent installation, I want to continue playing with the print or image as sculpture, and work with this ambiguity between the virtual and the object. The ambiguity might be felt in layered imagery, shifting transparency, or a slightly abject way of using materials; in crafting artworks I am confident in a fairly intuitive and playful approach to process and form. It is in my slightly fragmented approach to making, that I need to spend time ensuring each component of my work connects, through material and display, but also through intention. It is here that the language of touch and haptic perception, as examined in this essay, has become a reference to my material language, and continues to inform my practice.
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Bibliography
Falckenberg, H. Weibel, J (2009). Paul Thek: The Artist's Artist. Massachussets: MIT Press
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Friedberg, A (2006). The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft. Massachusetts: MIT Press
Derrida, J (2005). On Touching - Jean-Luc Nancy. Stanford University Press
Dent, P (2020). Sculpture and Touch. Routledge Press
Flusser, V (2000) Towards a Philosophy of Photography. Reaktion Books
Perella, C (2007) Ian Kiaer: British School at Rome. British Council
Schwenger, P (2006) The Tears of Things: Melancholy and Physical Objects. University of Minnesota Press.
Brubaker, D (2003) Merleau-Ponty’s Eye and Mind: Rethinking the Visible. Journal of Contemporary Thought, 17 ed.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1948). The World of Perception. Reprint, Oxford: Routledge, 2004
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Pelzer-Montada, R. (2008) The Attraction of Print: Notes on the Surface of the (Art) Print, Art Journal, vol. 67, no. 2, pp. 74-91.
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Falckenberg, H. Weibel, J (2009). Paul Thek: The Artist's Artist. Massachussets: MIT Press
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