grasp, grasp
‘grasp, grasp’ is a digital artwork produced as part of the research project ‘Fear and Belonging in Minority Buddhist Communities,’ which explores the productive role that fear and other negative emotions can have in the ongoing creation of belonging and community. The research, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, is grounded in the life stories of members of two different communities, collected by University of Manchester academics Erica Baffelli and Jane Caple between 2023 and 2025.
The artwork attempts to convey the tacit and indescribable elements of these stories, drawing on anonymised, sometimes translated transcripts, and contextualised through glimpses of community spaces, rituals and gatherings. Experienced at a distance, the process of engaging with the stories and creating the work involved a period of wrestling with an initial sense of uncertainty. In time, this was followed by a gradual acceptance of the unknown and a lessening discomfort of existing in a state of soft haziness.
The work reflects on the ephemerality of emotions. It meditates on unseen but deeply felt atmospheres and considers how trying to hold them too tightly is as futile as trying to catch smoke. It instead seeks to render a more open interpretation, which operates as a space for feelings to linger, intermingle and gradually be absorbed.
It hopes to emulate the feeling of being submerged in all the stories all at once, creating an undefined but reflective wash of emotion and experience. It explores how, in people’s everyday lives, fear exists as an undercurrent, weaving in and out of quotidian experiences. It considers fear’s entanglement with belonging and explores how these states coexist in tension.
The artwork uses hands as kind of universal language, to create anonymous yet expressive bodies. These choreographed subjects seek to convey hope, anxiety, togetherness and frustration, whilst also referencing Buddhist mudras. Projected onto the hands are photographic materials captured from shoots across England, Scotland and Japan. These layered images express distinct moments and textures from within the stories; when mapped out into larger compositions they find beautiful moments of discord and correlation across the many lived experiences.
The format of the work traverses multiple paths. It changes shape, operating in different sequences and moving in different directions. It invites viewers to be taken along by different currents, embracing multiple possibilities.
The work is filled with soundscapes and compositions that look to evoke different emotions and emulate some of the textures expressed in the stories. They seek to create a sensorial and embodied experience that emanates out of the screen, seeping into the surrounding atmosphere.
Without attempting to pin it down, the work hopes to assert the complicated beauty of human experience. It seeks to form a blurry vision of lives lived, that, with your gaze soft and your grip gentle, you can find yourself enveloped within.