I photographed 26 latex gloves found along a 5k stretch of road. I felt strangely attached to them, empathetic. There was something about their solitude and their connection to an absent person that intrigued me. Some of them looked dejected, some playful; some looked like they had a story or two to tell over a pint; some as though they’d simply been cut off at the wrist and left, hand still in place.
It interests me that solitude is so often thought of as synonymous with loneliness, and that loneliness is often treated as taboo. There was something about the gloves’ purpose of protecting against touch that seemed to give way to thoughts of loneliness. I began to think a lot about touch, or lack of – that human touch is something we need and crave, that without it we are more likely to succumb to physical illness, that there is such a thing as ‘skin hunger’.
I realised that the empathy I felt for the discarded gloves was partly based on the rhetoric of solitude as loneliness. I have always felt protective of solitude. More precisely, I have always felt protective of the time and space solitude affords. But solitude as choice often feels like it needs defending. And I think this has more to do with loneliness, and our fear of it.
