In late autumn 2024, I collected fallen leaves (sycamore, tulip poplar) near my home in Washington, D.C. and cut hands from them, using my right hand as a template. I made one hand, then twenty-six more from that first outline. The same shape, again and again, twenty-seven times, each iteration bearing the variations of its material but bound to the original pattern.
Placed outdoors on a table, the leaf-hands dried and decayed over several weeks. Wind animated them: waving, flapping, blowing them to the ground, refusing to stay still. The photographs and videos document what remains. The leaf-hands themselves are gone, but these images preserve the gesture, the movement, the ritual enacted.
Twenty seven hands for leaving was an experiment in impermanence. Its repetition became a form of ritual, a practice I needed to perform without yet understanding why. Using materials already in decay, making marks designed not to last, practicing what it means to make something knowing it will disappear. And to let it.
Earlier that year, I walked through the Veja Bridge in Italy, a natural stone arch that was once a paleolithic cave entrance. I thought about the people who had passed through that opening over tens of thousands of years, wondering if they marked their presence. In caves elsewhere, across continents, some did leave handprints on stone that have endured. Made by people who lived with the same seasonal rhythms, the same movements, for millennia before settlement and agriculture transformed their entire way of being. We cannot know what those ancient marks meant: hello or goodbye, presence or absence. But mine were always farewell. Hands waving in the wind, practicing release, learning to let go.