PalmisTree is an interactive installation/art project conceived for the Art in Nature – The Nature of Art Festival in 2010.
As a board member of Samavesha, a San Francisco Bay Area multidisciplinary performing arts non-profit dedicated to creating powerful site-specific events for the community, I wanted to share the joys of palmistry with the festival attendees in an interactive, visually stimulating and friendly format. I wished to convey the magic of our unique, individual, always surprisingly different handprints to all. I hoped to reveal how each of us is part of the fabric of creative collective that we call art. The play of words of Art in Nature, The Nature of Art led to my own exploration of Art in Hand… The Nature of Hand… Hand of Nature… the Hand of Art… Art of Hand…
As we visited the Stream Trail of Redwood Regional Park in the months leading up to the event, the inspiration was born to transform a wooden shelter at the end of the Trail into a mural of hand prints. A tree of human hands. The nature of the hand as our own unique mirror of nature transformed into a collective piece of art as we each leave our print in the world.
With the collaboration of Allison Shields, a dear friend and talented artist, we crafted the tree trunk and crinkle-cut the leaves that were to be the framework of the PalmisTree. We then cut out smaller green leaves on which to print the hands…
The slideshow below is of the day of the Festival. Thanks to the collaboration of Janet Perez, Madhavi Rathod, and Eleni Gekas, fellow practitioners of the sacred art of Hasta Sāmudrika Śāstra, we printed hundreds of hands during the event. Hands were printed, palmistry magic unfolded, and the attendees were invited to contribute their hand print to the PalmisTree.
The end result was not only a lovely PalmisTree that you can visit in the slideshow and pictures below, but also an increase in awareness on how beautiful and infinitely varied our human hands are, and how we each reflect a unique pattern of life. People also learned about basic palmistry and their own hand, discovering details about their destiny pattern and how our hands reflect larger cycles of nature.
