Tom Varley (b. 1985) is an artist living and working in Glasgow, Scotland. Since 2020 Tom has concentrated exclusively on painting and drawing. Prior to this he worked with a range of media including film, video, text, and installation. His artworks have often explored the subjective character of individual experience and how this relates to wider systems and structures — language, ideology, and economy.
Tom Varley (b. 1985) is an artist living and working in Glasgow, Scotland. Since 2020 Tom has concentrated exclusively on painting and drawing. Prior to this he worked with a range of media including film, video, text, and installation. His artworks have often explored the subjective character of individual experience and how this relates to wider systems and structures — language, ideology, and economy.
Mixed Media Installation comprising Text, Digital Print, Video, Weather Balloon, Hellium, Blue Light.
Dimensions Variable
No one from the village has ever seen the hand for the simple reason that no one has ever been far enough up. Our people’s technological accomplishments are renowned, but we have no helicopters or satellites… We have yet to invent flying machines of any kind. Our most ancient village lore teaches that we see by sensing electromagnetic radiation reflected from objects in the physical environment, and, on this basis, we believe a device for recording light to be not only possible but as good as prophesied. It is, however, thought unlikely that such technology could ever be manufactured small enough to be strapped to a bird or launched from a sling. The current prototypes are room-sized and require an artist to stand inside the device tracing a refracted image on vellum.
It is not known for certain whether our village is the shape a left hand with the palm face down or a right hand palm face up. The Village Elders will not be drawn, saying only that, viewed from above, “the thumb is in the east described by the meander of the river that irrigates our fields and permits trade with neighbouring villages; the long ridge to the west delineates the open curve from the tip of the little finger down to the wrist; and the terraced orchards in the north trace four fingers — only faintly in the spring and summertime, but quite clearly in the autumn when the leaves of the fruit trees yellow and wither and stand out against the surrounding evergreens.”
The Palm Readers have always believed the hand faces up. A tangle of intersecting paths, mounts and thoroughfares corresponding to the features of a human palm has been plotted through the village and interpreted according to the principals of The New Chirology. This reading aligns almost perfectly with the history described in the village annals and our perception of ourselves as a people. The Broadway, for example, which corresponds to the fate-line on a human palm, is fractured and indistinct on the edge of the village as the many roads and footpaths leading to and from neighbouring settlements gradually converge, reflecting the conflict that marred the founding and early development of our society. But the road becomes clearer and perfectly straight as it nears the marketplace, embodying the peaceful prosperity we have enjoyed since our final victory over the primitive peoples who populated this land before us, many generations ago.
A team of surveyors commissioned by the Palm Readers works night and day to map and remap the smaller trackways and mounts that constantly change, providing information about future harvests, the severity of winters, relations with neighbouring villages, and so on. The Palm Readers cross-reference the information from this survey with the broad reading of the village as well as a reading of an individual villager’s palm, allowing them to offer complex and highly accurate predictions in exchange for a proportion of the villager’s income. Great stock is placed in these readings. They have come to govern everything from military strategy to marriage proposals; crop rotations to planning applications.