Wildwood Press LLC
Valerie Hammond | At the Edge of Our Gardens
Valerie Hammond | At the Edge of Our Gardens
Valerie Hammond
When painter Michael Byron introduced me to Valerie Hammond’s work and suggested that I should print with her, I couldn’t imagine what I could do with this extraordinary imagery. There, captured under a thin glaze of wax, were a pair of life size hands composed of unimaginably delicate plants and flowers—I gasped. This is the point at which most of my collaborations begin — where the beguilingly beautiful and impossibly small meet the ten-foot press bed.
Valerie’s wax piece Séance both solved our challenge of scale and introduced to Valerie’s waxed work a new body of large, sumptuous pieces. The pattern of printing mirror-images of the resulting work — Blue Ghost/Spectre, Séance/Traverse, Garland/Guirland and finally, Traveler/Voyageur — with life size hands spilling forth a spray of vines, leaves and opening flowers speaks to testament/memorial, loss/memory, and the mystery of the time between.
The Traces followed with their inescapable blessings and pleas, as did the dresses dancing off the walls, the blue birds in flight and more and more. Sometimes it is even harder to stop than to begin.
Maryanne Ellison Simmons from Valerie Hammond/Twilight 2008
Image Credit:
Seance DETAIL
Valerie’s work exists in a glimmer, in the periphery, slightly away or out of vision, in a kind of magical realm in the musty undergrowth at the edge of our gardens.
Kiki Smith from Valerie Hammond/Twilight 2008
Garland DETAIL
Guirlande DETAIL
Two Dresses and The Birds Had Flown
Valerie Hammond maintains a fluid artistic practice, distinguishable for her organic approach and deft interaction with different mediums. In all of her work, there is play between the material and the immaterial, the physical and the spiritual: the dichotomy between what is seen and the sensation it provokes. The works inhabit a space she is constantly searching for, straddling the indefinable boundary between presence and absence, material and immaterial, consciousness and the unconscious. Her artwork becomes emblematic not only of the people whose hands she has traced or the subjects she is drawing but of her own evolving artist process-testimony to the passing of time and the quiet dissolution of memory. Her work can be found in both private and public collections such as the Walker Art Center, the Library of Congress, The Fine Arts Museum Houston, The Progressive Art Collection, the Fidelity Collection, the New York Public Library’s print and drawing collection, The Chazen Museum, The Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, The Grand Palais Museum, Paris and the Getty Museum. She is a recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, and has exhibited in solo and group shows nationally and internationally.
Maggie Wright, Director Easton Foundation, Louise Bougeois Archive valeriehammond.com
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