Man Hands On explores ideas of coded behaviour, power dynamics, and epistemic injustice in relation to childhood and old age. Through a process of re-examination and reappropriation, details from archive (family) photographs unveil unspoken forces and ask us to consider how these change over a lifetime; from a child ‘not heard’ and an adult ‘not listening’, to an older person ‘not listened to’.

The title Man Hands On references a line from Philip Larkin’s poem, This Be the Verse: “Man hands on misery to man” alluding to this hereditary occurrence and its repetitive, cyclical nature. Stanzas from this and the encrypted funerial poem, The Life that I Have, by Leo Marks, are juxtaposed to produce a dialectical tension in response to visual works.