Golden Hands

"The large-scale pencil and graphite drawings are from a series that Feferman began in the 1990s. She had intended to make one hundred all told but the project was interrupted half way through by her illness. Forty-two of these are reproduced in the book, Golden Hands: Drawings and Reflections (2009). They are inspired by the gift of a beautifully sewn cotton apron that her grandmother, Helen Grand Feferman, made at the age of 14 in pre-World War I Poland; an émigré to the United States following the war, she lived to the age of 100. The drawings incorporate frequent references to the apron as well as to symbols of Jewish life and, in the end, to Helen herself, while reminders of the Holocaust form a thrumming undercurrent. In praise of the "wide graphic range and consummate artistry" in the Golden Hands series, the art critic Irving Sandler wrote that "Rachel Feferman's drawings are direct from the heart to the hand. Her poignant images - aprons, hands with needles, loaves of bread - set against unsettling backgrounds of bodies are pervaded by a sense of life's pain"--https://www.biartmuseum.org/exhibitions/past-exhibitions/rachel-feferman-retrospective-a-hole-in-the-heart/