Keya Tama

“The Hand Remembers”

Painted inside of an abandoned fish canning factory in St Helena Bay.

The work considers the small gestures and eccentricities that pass quietly between generations as embodied memories. The way a hand rests, moves or comforts can carry something older than language. The hands are drawn with a delicate organic restraint and are set against the rigid geometry of the factory. Their softness creates a formal tension with the architecture, existing as a gesture against structure. Pastel greens give the figures the quality of a faded ornament, in aims to reflect the past and its ancient echoes.

The building itself is slowly being taken by the Atlantic. What the sea keeps, the hand remembers. As it erodes, individual bricks are reclaimed, chiseled clean by hand and used again in nearby buildings. The ruin therefore becomes less an ending than a material archive. its fragments entering new structures while its history survives through people, stories and gesture.