Welcome to Hand & Shadow

If you linger on the smallest details, have found and carried around a feather or bone, or saved your molars long after they were removed, you’re likely to fall for Hand & Shadow.

The designs of Hand & Shadow pay attention to all the small things, not missing a stray hair or cracked tooth. All garments are printed by hand in Hamilton.  This allows the uniqueness of each print to show in the variance of colour, texture and placement.  They are made in small volumes using sustainable, sweatshop free products where possible. The inks are pigment or bleach based, leaving each garment soft to the touch, and will not crack or fade.

Hand & Shadow designs are Inspired by many things such as the Victorians, nature and natural history, scientific illustration (modern and ancient), museum collections, contemporary craft, and textile art. 

The natural world in both its blossom and decay exists in tandem – drawing you closer than ever before to the neck of a howling beast or the cracks of a human skull.  There is a beauty revealed here. Teeth are mistaken for lace or pearls, and hair flows and curls like fine ribbons.

Georgie Russell graduated from the Visual Arts Program at Emily Carr University with an emphasis in printmaking.

After graduating she focused her energy on arts organizing, becoming a founding member of the Seamrippers Craft Collective.  She took part in curating the gallery shows, organizing craft fairs and setting up and running the screen-printing workshops.  In 2007 after the folding of Seamrippers, she began art-making in earnest. Looking for a way to incorporate what she had learned as an organizer with an interest in fabric, she saw that her practice could best take shape in the form of a company that produced her screen printed images on clothing + textiles. Hand and Shadow is the fruit of this kind of labor, careful screens crafted from both found images and the hand drawn.