Senses Lights – Touch & Feel

TOUCH & FEEL is the sixth conceptual art sculpture from Steit’s ongoing Senses Project, a conceptual series that has used the primary human senses as both subject and structural principle since its origins at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam in the early 1990s. As the final pairing in the series, it addresses the most fundamental sense of all, the one we are born with first, and the one that never switches off.

As with every work in the series, the piece presents its two words as a single interlocked typographic mass, fabricated through 3D printing and internally lit with LED illumination. The letterforms press into one another, dense and inseparable, so that touch and feel must be disentangled by the eye before they can be considered as distinct ideas. The sculpture demands the very act of attention it describes.

That distinction, quiet as it is, carries considerable weight. Touching is physical and directional. A hand makes contact with a surface and receives information: temperature, texture, pressure, shape. Feeling is something larger and less easily located. It is the emotional and psychological resonance that touch can produce, the interior response to exterior contact. We touch with the body; we feel with our whole selves. By fusing the two into one illuminated, inseparable object, the work asks where the physical ends and the emotional begins, and whether that boundary can meaningfully be drawn at all.

There is also something quietly self-referential about this piece within the context of the series as a whole. A sculpture is an inherently tactile object. It exists in three dimensions, has surface and weight and depth. Yet the viewer is not invited to touch it. The LED light that radiates beyond the letterforms into the surrounding wall creates warmth and presence at a distance, a glow that can be seen but not held. The work offers the suggestion of touch without the possibility of it and in that gap, asks what it means to truly feel something.

Consistent with Steit’s broader practice, TOUCH & FEEL prioritises idea over spectacle. It completes the Senses Project not with resolution but with an open question. A conversation the artist initiates, and the viewer is invited to complete.