Janine Wang | Artist
Fresh Meadows, NY, USA

Cuppable Cups—
My favorite quality in wood furniture is the feeling that comes from running my hands across it and imagining I can feel its maker’s experience. One of the most beautiful parts about learning a craft is being granted the power to read into the stories that objects carry. The hand lives on in the things that it has done.

We lead with our hands, into people, new objects, and places. I’ve always loved the idea of a handle
of an object being the hand of it. A teapot can say “hello, please hold me this way.” And to “shake the
hand[le]” of a building before entering is as a means of introduction to a space. Our daily lives are full
of mundane experiences in which our hands are so quietly involved that we can forget how dependent on them we really are.

This work is a woodturner’s meditation on the hand. It is based on my own hands, turned into accommodating gestures that hope to communicate an experience of making and turning, learning and listening, and holding and molding—from my hand to yours.