Hand Medal Project
Our MH is a registered jeweller for The Hand Medal Project. Her registration number is 531.
Through The Hand Medal Project, metal artists, Iris Eichenberg and Jimena Ríos, have asked jewellers worldwide to make hand-shaped medals for health workers at the forefront of Covid 19. The medals are an acknowledgement of the hard work undertaken by nurses, doctors, and other hospital staff during the pandemic1.
Jewellers [MEDALmakers] are creating medals from an established template, saw-piercing them from their chosen metal then attaching a ribbon and a safety pin. After cleaning and marking them with their assigned number, the medals are given to ‘Keepers’ who catalogue them to establish provenance, box them and hold onto them until the end of October, 2020.
The medals will then be handed over to their chosen health worker.
The medals were conceptualised in Spain, a country with a high proportion of deaths from Covid 19.
They are reminiscent of ex-votos, tokens offered as a gift of gratitude for a miracle at a time of great hardship. They are physical testimonies of an event, historical or personal, pinned on walls and offered up to saints, deities or spirits.
Bound up with the idea of thanksgiving is the concept of medals handed over at the end of battle to brave soldiers and mighty generals. The two seemingly disparate ideas coming together, here, framing the spirit of our times.
The fact that all of the hand medals will be similar in size, shape and material harken to regiments.
Tied up in this symbolic dance of ideas of war and thanksgiving is the hand; the increase of hand washing related to this virus and the vast amounts of safety gloves and sanitiser used and discarded .
It is also a reminder of our inability to touch another human, as a restriction of the virus. Further, the choice of using hands as medals is a symbolic reference to healing and making, where health workers use their hands to make sick people better, and jewellers use theirs to make tokens of love, friendship and collectedness.
References
1. https://klimt02.net/forum/articles/hand-medal-project-healthcare-workers-jimena-rios-iris-eichenberg
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