Print Contemporary Practice
Ester Redlichová
Look Ma, No Hands!
Look Ma, No Hands! is an exploration of the feeling of cycling. Inspired by Dervla Murphy’s memoirs on cycling and Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, Ester Redlichova takes a journey into the homes, lives, and minds of “The Bike Folk”.
The Bike Folk are people who create a relationship with their bicycles, in which the bicycle is no longer just a mode of transport. They invite bicycles to share their domestic spaces, as vehicles of memory and enablers of freedom. The bicycle becomes part of The Bike Folk and vice versa.
As bicycles are machines operated by the body and largely unchanged since their invention, Ester sees a natural affinity with analogue photography and video, and chooses these as her primary tool to document The Bike Folk.
The contrast of black and white and colour photography is an important border between the changing and unchanging aspects of The Bike Folk’s lives. The moving portraits confronting us with their thoughts are represented with lack of colour to denote the unchanging feelings of humans through generations. The colour photographs signify the changing environment around those same people. The past and the present are both cycling within us, with the bicycle as a connector.