23. Beyond the Hand: Re-considering Authorship through Disability

The hand articulates art history’s entire system of value, which is established around manual labour and marks. Drawing manuals published since the early modern period teach how to train a dexterous hand through repeated inscriptions of lines, while art historians seek—at times forensically—traces of the artist’s touch in their productions. Across periods and media, however, images have been made using other body parts: the mouth, the shoulder, the nose, the foot, prostheses and assistive devices. When the maker’s body departs from the norm, art historians tend to read workmanship from a biographical lens, often discussing it as wondrous feat rather than expanding the scope of artistic technique.

This session asks what becomes of authorship, skill, dexterity, and attribution when the trained, normative hand is neither the work’s origin nor instrument. What happens to connoisseurship when the autograph mark is made by other means? How might attention to non-normative making reshape discourses around artistic production?

We welcome papers from any period, medium, or geography, on artists who worked without hands or with disabled hands; the use of prosthetic, instrumental, and assistive practices in representation. Our shared aim is a session in which complex embodiment sets the terms.

Themes: Disability studies, Embodiment, Authorship

Additional format comment: Sessions of four 20-minute research papers, each followed by 5 minutes for questions.

Lead Convenor: Virginia Marano, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany

Co-convenors: Pierre Von-Ow, University of St Andrews, United Kingdom

To submit a Paper to this Session, please follow the guidance on our website and complete the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal Submission Form.