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We use our hands to explore the world around us; to manipulate and change it; to communicate; to signify aggression, submission or gratitude; to comfort or arouse; to make music, craft and create. We point, punch, tweak and text. We ball our fists, spread our palms, give someone the thumbs up and close our hands in prayer.

More than anything else, is it our hands which make us human?

In this series considers the human hand from five quite different angles: manipulation, creativity, gesture, communication and touch. In each programme we hear from people who have a very particular perspective on hands and the way we use them, including a dancer, a surgeon, a massage therapist, a priest and the recipient of a hand transplant. Each of them takes a long look at their own hands, describes what they see and considers the relationship with the world which their hands give them.

As we encounter healing hands, steady hands, talking hands, holding hands and the laying-on of hands we come to understand just how much our hands identify and define us.

The second episode explores the way we use our hands to craft and create. We hear from world renowned harpist Catrin Finch who’s spent a lifetime training her fingers in the extraordinary dexterity, deftness and grace her instrument requires.

Alex Pole began his career as a jeweller but is now a renowned blacksmith, crafting kitchen tools, knives and axes. He explains how his hands have to wield a hammer with accuracy and sensitivity as well as strength. They also need resilience as they withstand twenty thousand impacts a day.

Alex’s hands are one of the subjects of photographer Tim Booth’s project ‘A Show of Hands’. For more than two decades, starting with his own grandmother’s, Tim has photographed the hands of dozens of people, from miners to mechanics, sportsmen and women to rock stars, mountaineers to gravediggers. He considers what our hands say about our skills, our lives and our sense of self.

Producer: Jeremy Grange

Photograph courtesy of Tim Booth - 'A Show of Hands' Project

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