Echoes of Presence

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, Echoes of Presence 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.

Kenneth Greiner
Hybrid Fields, 2025
Oil paint and charcoal on London plane bark, mounted on branches with white string and jute twine
52 x 56 x 3 cm

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.

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.