Iman Sidonie-Samuels, Dried, 2025, Rust print on plastic voile, 175 x 125 cm. Photo credits: Iman Sidone-Samuels

Hands-on is pleased to present Echoes of Presence, the final residency exhibition featuring the works of Iman Sidonie-Samuels, Kenneth Greiner, Narelle Dore, and the collective Maryam Bin Bishr, Nuhaila AlHemeiri, and Salma Hani Ali.

Emerging from a shared attentiveness to material, memory, and gesture, the exhibition unfolds as a constellation of practices that explore presence, care, and relationality. Across their works, the artists foreground the overlooked-objects, spaces, or processes that carry histories, bodies, and ecosystems within them. These works reveal a commitment to attentive making, where materials are both archive and collaborator, and where meaning emerges through touch, action, and engagement.

The exhibition is a space of resonance and permeability- where domestic, urban, and natural worlds intersect, and where materials and gestures negotiate continuity, transformation, and memory. Function becomes proposition, form becomes record, and materials carry stories that are ecological, ancestral, and social.

Iman Sidonie-Samuels draws on the intimate architecture of the West Indian Front Room to investigate care, fragility, and preservation within the home. Through the recurring motif of lace curtains, her work traces the protocols of domestic upkeep and their cultural resonance, reflecting on what remains when these practices can no longer be enacted. The project transforms memory into material, revealing both tenderness and tension embedded in everyday spaces.

Kenneth Greiner reimagines the conventions of painting, expanding them into the territory of material, texture, and environment. Using bark, jute, and foraged materials, his “anti-paintings” explore visual ambiguity, ecological processes, and social signaling, drawing connections between urban landscapes, queer temporality, and historical narratives. Constructed outdoors, his works carry the marks of weather and time, embodying a rooted, imperfect optimism that merges past and present in a tactile, living composition.

Maryam Bin Bishr, Nuhaila AlHemeiri, and Salma Hani Ali investigate urban space as a site of informal community. By examining the simple brick as an activation device, their work reveals the improvisational gestures through which people reshape marginal spaces into points of connection. The interplay of raw bricks and transparent acrylic, alongside the reuse of waste ceramics, reflects the potential of discarded and overlooked materials to generate dialogue, presence, and communal agency.

Narelle Dore explores tone in its dual sense of colour and sound, translating the natural frequencies of foraged pigments into embodied gestures on raw canvas. Her works make visible the rhythms of mark-making, echo, and transfer, connecting land, ancestral knowledge, and materiality. Colour becomes a voice and gesture: a medium through which the body and ecosystem resonate in tandem.

Together, these practices articulate a shared language of attentiveness, care, and material memory. Echoes of Presence invites viewers to inhabit spaces where gesture, object, and environment converge- where the overlooked is made present, where materials speak, and where memory and action coexist in a state of continuous becoming.