A study · RA.1998.1
Nexus-1 study
The first Nexus study, finished in 1998: a single hand on a walnut plinth that picks up whatever is put in front of it. Kept at the House with the collection, though not part of it.
1998
In 1996 the President asked the Atelier whether the house could make a hand: not a hand that played a typewriter, as the Correspondent’s did, but a hand that could pick up anything put in front of it and set it down again without being told how. Nexus-1 was the answer, and took two years.
It is a left hand on a walnut plinth, with a small tray in front of it. If a visitor places an object in the tray, the hand considers it, picks it up, turns it over and puts it back. It has handled, by the house’s count, a little over forty thousand objects, including a raw egg on several hundred occasions. It has never broken one.
It is not part of the heritage collection, which ends in 1979, but it is kept with it and shown on any visit, because it is the last study the house is content to show without a license. The later Nexus studies have not been shown outside the Atelier.
Object record
- Object type
- Mechanical hand; study
- Made
- The Atelier, Seattle, 1996–1998
- Makers
- Nine, under the Master of the Atelier
- Materials and techniques
- Titanium, blued steel, silicone over silk; walnut plinth
- Dimensions
- Hand 19 cm; plinth 30 × 24 cm
- Accession number
- RA.1998.1
- Certificate of provenance
- No. 58 870
- Location
- The House, Seattle. Shown on any visit
- Record
- Cataloged 2001; revised 2026
Records in the heritage catalog are compiled from the Register of Provenance and the makers’ own notebooks. Where the two disagree, the Register is preferred and the disagreement noted. Return to the collection