What Hands Do

What Hands Do is a body of work that Jeannie Ortiz has been working on for the past year. It is a deeply personal journey brought to life through watercolor paintings, printmaking and pit-fired ceramic sculpture.

Most of the 150+ watercolor paintings that she created have been bound into two handmade books.

The intaglio prints are 16 botanical studies of plants from northern New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming. One set of these prints was also bound into a large format book entitled ‘What are The Colors of the Place You Love Most in This World.’ There will also be a body of these prints - many of which have been watercolored. 

There is also a sculpture component to this installation. Ceramics was Jeannie’s first love. She began pit-firing clay pieces in high school and studied it more deeply in college. With great joy, in the last year she has been drawn back into this form of creating. This installation is a meditation on deep time, lineage and loss.

All of these works come together in a study of what it means to be a floating body in this world, to be both deeply connected to and completely severed from our past. A deep meditation on new connections to understand ones body through the act of creating and connecting to the non-human world.