grandma's hands
In his latest works, Thomas Hansson highlights a piece of family history, interweaving craft, heritage, and identity across generations.
– My grandmother Kerstin and my paternal grandmother Ingrid were diligent and meticulous needleworkers. They always had knitting needles or a crochet hook within arm’s reach, the artist says.
The paternal grandmother passed away in the 1990s, but the maternal grandmother’s hands kept working almost until the very end. That persistence is now at the heart of the artist’s project.
– My great-grandmother taught my grandmother, my grandmother taught my mother, and my mother tried to teach me. The interest was there, but so was a certain restlessness, the artist explains.
– I haven’t learned how to knit, and as for crochet—let’s just say I understand it in theory. My own attempts tend to get tangled.
Thomas Hansson with several variants of Grandma's hands at ed. art
Even so, the craft became a key entry point for the work, which the artist describes as a tribute to the women in the family.
– This is my homage to the women who clothed me and kept me warm, but also an attempt to keep that lineage of handcraft alive.
A central part of the story concerns the grandmother’s hands, which bore the marks of a serious accident in her youth.
– She lost several fingers in an accident on a farm in northeastern Skåne. When I asked to photograph her hands, she refused. She would always hide her injured hand—it was something she felt ashamed of.
At the same time, those very hands created the foundation for the artwork.
– It was with those hands, with eight and a half fingers, that she crocheted the granny squares that were joined into a blanket in my childhood home. That blanket gave me the idea. I asked my mother to crochet the template for the print based on the granny squares from that blanket. With my great-grandmother’s knowledge, my grandmother’s original work, my mother’s craftsmanship, and my own expression, I’m trying to draw a straight line through time, the artist says.
The project thus becomes more than a work of art—it is a way of preserving and making visible a heritage.
– It’s an attempt to carry on a tradition that shows who I am and where I come from. Something I’m proud of.
Thomas Hansson with the linocut that forms the basis for all versions of Grandma’s Hands.
About Grandma’s Hands:
The work is fundamentally a black linocut, hand-printed by the artist. On top of this, the artist has hand-colored all the colored areas, thereby creating eight unique variations of the granny square. Each colorway is produced in an edition of three.
