“NE TOUCHE PAS! NE TOUCHE PAS!”
Two thoughts on tactility:
1. Today through my screen I receive messages, warnings, orders - they have no physical weight, no scale, no smell. These messages tell us to curb our desires for the pleasures of interaction with the world outside of our domestic bubbles and our virtual habitats. And so we ache for the feeling of park grass between our toes on a summer day. We long to pick up a fruit in the grocery store and with a light squeeze test if it’s ripe. We wish to enter one another’s houses and smell their familiar smells - to breathe where people we love breathe. Writing this I feel attraction and repulsion. My hands are dry and smell of alcohol.
2. When I was very young, maybe 5, my family drove from our small town in southern Ontario to Nova Scotia - for the first time and the last. We stayed in a hotel somewhere in Quebec city. My 9 year-old sister, tasked with keeping an eye on me for a moment, led me to the hotel’s gift shop. My chubby child hands grazed the surface of some animal in a display–– maybe more than grazed, as my touch sent the whole glass shelf tinkling precariously. The shopkeeper –from some unseen corner of the crowding kitsch– began screaming “NE TOUCHE PAS! NE TOUCHE PAS!” as I ran from the shop, frightened and embarrassed. My hands were trembling and excited.
Phoebe Todd-Parrish
Phoebe received her Master of Fine Arts in Printmaking from the University of Alberta in 2018, after previously completing her Master of Arts in English from York University in 2016. Although she would consider herself primarily a printmaker, Phoebe’s practice spans a wide variety of mediums and scales - from intimate artists' books to sculpture and animation. Phoebe teaches sessionally in printmaking and art, leading courses in printmaking and book arts internationally (and now, virtually!).