Tom Hammick: Nightfire 2020

Tom Hammick NIGHTFIRE

Tom Hammick NIGHTFIRE 29th September – 13th November 2020

Lyndsey Ingram 20 Bourdon Street, London W1K 3P L T. +44 (0)20 7629 8849 E. info@lyndseyingram.com W. lyndseyingram.com

ly n d s e y i n g r a m

It is a great privilege to start our fall season with this exhibition of new work by Tom Hammick. So much has changed in our world since this exhibition was initially conceived and we have decided to shift from our originally planned survey show to present only Tom’s most recent prints and paintings. Everything here has been made over the past several months, during this extraordinary period of global change. A particular current of unrest, but also of hope, emanates from these images.

I first came to Tom’s work though his woodcuts, which I have long admired.

I can think of no other living artist who has a greater facility with this traditional printmaking technique. His talent with this medium is evidenced by the proliferation of ambitious and beautiful woodcuts that have come from his busy print studio. Made in small editions and often printed in unique colour combinations, Tom’s woodcuts are like no other. Some of his most exceptional projects to date are included here.

Also included in our exhibition are Tom’s most recent paintings. Ranging in scale from monumental to modest, the paintings all share a remarkable strength. I am delighted to be able to show these alongside his woodcuts, which has never been done before. It is fascinating to see how he often works through a subject in several iterations, changing the scale and medium as he comes to terms with the image’s emotional content.

This show would not have been possible without the help and encouragement of many friends and colleagues – most importantly those who first introduced us to Tom and supported the project along the way. I would also like to thank Emma Hill for her hugely insightful text and Sophie Ansell, Tom’s studio manager, for her invaluable assistance.

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Tristan’s Fire, edition variable reduction woodcut, 2020. Numbered 4/14. (Detail)

Foreword

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Sky Park, edition variable reduction woodcut, 2020. Numbered I/IV. (Detail)

Tom Hammick: Nightfire emma hill

In thinking about the paintings and prints that are presented in Tom Hammick’s solo exhibition Nightfire, I call to mind a passage in J.G. Ballard’s short story The Waiting Grounds (1959), which could be said to provide in words an equivalent to Hammick’s compelling woodcut image, Sky Park (2020).

“For aeons I plunged, spiralling weightlessly through a thousand whirling vortexes, swirled and buffeted down chasmic eddies, splayed out across the disintegrating matrix of the continuum, a dreamless ghost in flight from the cosmic Now. Then a million motes of light prickled the darkness above me, illuminating enormous curving causeways of time and space veering out past the stars to the rim of the galaxy.”

Ballard’s writing was a warning against sleepwalking into entropy. An atheist, his views about human-kind’s potential future had been forged by the atrocities of the Second World War. His narratives foretell – through the prism of an extraordinary imagination – the consequences of ecological collapse, planetary overcrowding, the rise of the machine. First published as a science fiction writer, he was ambivalent about the categorisation. He said that his interest lay in describing a real future he could see approaching and to do this he mined a kind of ‘visionary present’.1 ‘Visionary’ is a word that has been applied to Hammick’s art – most recently by the art critic Donald Kuspit, in a highly perceptive review of Lunar Voyage – a cycle of 17 large woodcuts that the artist completed in 2017.

A lone astronaut travels through the dark reaches of space, his voyage punctuated by dreams of home, as if – by undertaking the journey – he 7

has come to intuit the Tabula rasa of all that he has journeyed from.

Writing about one of the prints in the series, the critic touches upon a sense of duality that is expressed in Hammick’s work: “It is an image of mute despair and reverent awe, the anonymous human figure, humbled by the infinite sky, almost disappearing into the oblivion.”.2 Dualities extend beyond the existential themes of his images into the processes by which they are made. The exhibition reveals a remarkably pliant visual language, developed through an integrated practice of painting and printmaking, which allows him to combine very different kinds of formal tropes. By incorporating imagistic elements within abstract frameworks, he is able to suggest on one picture plane vast expanses of temporal and spatial strata, which at moments hint towards the infinite.

As Kuspit notes, “He persuades incommensurate forms to relate but not integrate, …” 3 The majority of the works presented in Nightfire were completed between the months of March – August this year and inevitably the exhibition poses a question about how art responds in a time of human crisis. This it answers in much the way Goya did, when he inscribed on the etching plates of the Disasters of War, the statement: “I saw this, I was here.”. Hammick focusses on what is meaningful to him, in a way that is open and exposed.

“My imagery, even more than usual is full of quite a lot of pain and yearning that can come as a natural counterpoint to grief. So the old themes of who we are, where we live, questions of even if it’s possible to have a home… have become in lockdown much more corporeal. It’s as if the world, its creatures, the insects living in my studio… all this is somehow in me and me in it.” 4 8

These themes are reflected in motifs that extend from the microcosm of a single figure or family group seen against a background of landscape, to the macrocosm of sky and beyond. All the pictures in the exhibition are night scenes, dramatically lit by moonlight, or firelight, or by pulsating colour that runs beneath their surfaces. Their imagistic elements are arranged, or staged, in very particular ways, within wider visual schemas – a formal aspect that gives the work a powerful sense of suspension.

The images’ dramatic effects have been heightened not only by the experience of enforced isolation but they also bear the influence of Hammick’s time as Associate Artist at Glyndebourne Opera, during the latter months of 2019. Woven into the fabric of the recent paintings and prints are references to the plots of Die Zauberflöte, Fidelio and Tristan und Isolde – all of which revolve around stories about the testing of love. His response to the music has led to a way of navigating reiterated pictorial motifs and by re-working the images in different mediums he is able to test their metaphorical range. Richard Wagner’s textured orchestration – with its chromaticism and tonal ambiguities – has particularly influenced his approach. As he says: “Wagner’s music in Tristan und Isolde folds in on itself – it circles, folds in, folds out and comes back.”

Chronologically, the exhibition originates in an edition variable etching, titled (after the Japanese poet Basho) Narrow Road to the Deep North (2019),5 which was developed from a line drawing Hammick made of his wife walking ahead of him in the woods at Powdermills in East Sussex.

The figure in the etching is completely integrated within the harmonious moonlit landscape. Emblematic and incorporeal, she exists, like Ballard’s 9

‘dreamless ghost’, at a very peculiar point in the flat picture plane. She is simply a silhouette, filled by bands of electric colour that have been made by laying down a digitally printed chine collé paper during the first printing of the etching plate.

Tamino in the Wilderness (2020) – a reduction woodcut of the same motif – incorporates a similar kind of manipulation of the work’s surface presence.

The grain of the print’s wooden matrix runs perceptibly through the entire picture surface and is highlighted in the trunks of the trees. The detail reminds us of the print’s materiality and draws the eye back and forth between the illusion of the image and the revelation of its construction.

In Deep North (2020) – an oil painting of the figure in the woods – bands of bright striated colour are painted first onto the primed surface of the canvas, then overlaid with darker pigments. The under colours (revealed in the contours of the landscape) are of such intensity they suggest an energy current drawn from out of the ground – as if this lifeforce is the subject of painting, rather than the illusion the image describes. The painting’s components follow the prints closely but they lead to an entirely different emotional effect. The figure – no longer an emblem, or arrangement of abstract pattern – is depicted representationally. She has become not only human, but poignantly specific.

Hammick uses paint’s substance – its slipperiness, transparencies and opacities – in various ways. In the tiny panel Libestod I (2020), he thickly applies it in crenelations of opaque colour to describe a landmass of enormous scale; while in the surface of The Unending Sky (2020), paint captures and reflects light in a way that mirrors the phenomena of the twinkling stars.

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Art Life (2020) – a related painting and woodcut print – centres on an image of two figures in a clearing. The work was inspired by Werner Herzog’s documentary The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner (1974), about the life of a celebrated ski jumper who worked as carpenter. In the film’s extended opening sequence a shot is slowed to prolong an image of Steiner sailing through the air as if he is a bird caught on the wind’s current. For Hammick, it is a powerful metaphor about creation that encapsulates both the sense of the artist as craftsman and the necessary mental isolation involved in making art.

The male and female figures stand with their backs to each other, surrounded by the forms of the large carved birds. In the painting’s foreground, each evenly paced visual element is enshrined by a curious halo, or undercurrent in the paint, which serves to contain it within its own hermetic space. The woman leans out of the composition, almost as if she is about to depart.

Both painting and woodcut are richly ornamented with visual incident.

The travellers’ vans are elaborately decorated and inscribed with their owners’ names. Silver moonlight (beautifully conveyed in the print by the veil of smoke that drifts from the camp fire), brings a heightened atmosphere to the woodland scene. Yet for all its visual magic, the image speaks of estrangement. Its composition carries a sense of disjunction that Kuspit described – as if the various elements are “magnetically attracted to each other but unable to reconcile.”.6 In the magnificent recent woodcut Deep End, which is predicated on Beethoven’s Fidelio, Hammick borrows from Renaissance and Asian traditions 11

visual schema. The opera’s heroine Leonora appears as a silhouette at seven different points in the composition. Nature is above her and around her as she descends into the prison to rescue her husband Florestan.

Despite the woodcut’s complex matrix, its progression aims towards a kind of simplification. Layers of detailed visual information are overprinted with an ever darkening veil – much like the fade-out of lights in a theatre – a gradual deepening.

The images brought together in Nightfire convey a profound sense of longing. Their human elements are presented – like emblems – ever more from a distance, in reiterated motifs that carry complex ideas about the nature of dwelling, love and loss. Increasingly these are shown in relation to vast frameworks and the artist suggests there may be solace in this. He implies, that like Ballard’s solitary protagonist, if we look further than ourselves we may eventually discover a pattern, or point of origin, within the infinite reaches of an endless universe.

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J. G. Ballard, Author’s Note, J. G. Ballard The Complete Short Stories, Vol. 1. Fourth Estate

2

Donald Kuspit, Tom Hammick, Flowers Gallery, Artforum January 2018

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Ibid

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Tom Hammick, Email, 16 July 2020

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Matsuo Basho, Narrow Road to the Deep North 1689

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Donald Kuspit, Tom Hammick, Flowers Gallery, Artforum January

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Deep End, edition variable reduction woodcut, 2020. Numbered 2/3. (Detail)

to incorporate a sense of all the world contained within one extended

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Sky Park Edition variable reduction woodcut printed in colours, with hand painting, 2020 Signed in pencil and numbered I from the edition of IV 167 × 101 cm (65 3/4 × 39 3/4 in) 14

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Tristan’s Fire Edition variable reduction woodcut printed in colours, 2020 Signed in pencil and numbered 1 from the edition of 14 102 × 142 cm (40 1/8 × 55 7/8 in) 17

Tethered Oil on wood, 2020 Signed verso 25 � 17 cm (9 7/8 � 6 3/4 in) 18

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Art Life Oil on canvas, 2020 Signed verso 150 × 200 cm (59 1/8 × 78 3/4 in) 21

Narrow Road to the Deep North Edition variable etching with aquatint and chine collé, 2019 Signed in pencil and numbered 9 from the edition of 30 68 × 56 cm (26 3/4 × 22 1/8 in) 22

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Deep End Edition variable reduction woodcut printed in colours, 2020 Signed in pencil and numbered 2 from the edition of 3 121 × 199 cm (47 5/8 × 78 3/8 in) 24

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Tristan’s Fire Oil on canvas, 2020 Signed verso 91 � 121 cm (35 7/8 � 47 5/8 in) 26

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Art Life Edition variable reduction woodcut printed in colours, 2020 Signed in pencil and numbered 1 from the edition of 15 100 × 140 cm (39 3/8 × 55 1/8 in) 29

The Unending Sky Oil on canvas, 2020 Signed verso 200 × 150 cm (78 3/4 × 59 1/8 in) (Detail overleaf) 30

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“I could not sleep for thinking of the sky, The unending sky, with all its million suns Which turn their planets everlastingly In nothing, where the fire-haired comet runs.”

– John Masefield, The Unending Sky

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Liebestod, Study I (In the World Breath) Oil on wood, 2020 Signed verso 22.5 � 15 cm (8 7/8 � 5 7/8 in) 34

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Tamino in the Wilderness Edition variable reduction woodcut printed in colours, with hand painting, 2020 Signed in pencil and numbered 1 from the edition of 14 119 × 89 cm (46 7/8 × 35 1/8 in) 37

Tristan’s Fire, Study Oil on wood, 2020 Signed verso 30 × 40 cm (11 3/4 × 55 7/8 in) 38

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Liebestod, Study II (In the Sound of Sound) Oil on wood, 2020 Signed verso 30 � 22.5 cm (11 3/4 � 8 7/8 in) 41

Deep North Oil on canvas, 2020 Signed verso 152 � 122 cm (59 7/8 � 48 1/8 in) 42

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Sky Park Edition variable reduction woodcut printed in colours, 2020 Signed in pencil and numbered II from the edition of II 167 × 101 cm (65 3/4 × 39 3/4 in) 45

Hover Oil on wood, 2020 Signed verso 25 � 17 cm (9 7/8 � 6 3/4 in) 46

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Tristan's Fire Edition variable reduction woodcut printed in colours, 2020 Signed in pencil and numbered 4 from the edition of 14 102 � 142 cm (40 1/8 � 55 7/8 in) 49

Night Heron Oil on Gessobord, 2020 Signed verso 24 � 18 cm (9 1/2 � 7 1/8 in) 50

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Tom Hammick in his studio in East Sussex, 2016. Photograph by Leigh Simpson

Biography

Tom Hammick was born in 1963. He studied Art History at The University of Manchester and later Fine Art Painting at Camberwell College of Art and NSCAD, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Canada. He has an MA in Printmaking, also from Camberwell, and taught Fine Art Painting and Printmaking for many years until recently at The University of Brighton.

Tom lives and breathes his work whilst negotiating the demands of being a father to three more or less grown up children. His imagery, glowing with “mute despair and reverent awe”,1 manifests itself between paintings made in a shack in a field under the stars in East Sussex and prints made in a purpose designed print studio in South East London on the Thames.

His work is informed by a passion for poetry and music, film, wonderment for the environment and the deepest concerns around climate change. He is a season ticket holder at The Emirates Stadium and is hoping that Mikel Arteta will restore Arsenal to their former glory.

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Donald Kuspit, Tom Hammick, Flowers Gallery, Art Forum, January 2018 53

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2020

2012

Miles To Go Before I Sleep, Paul Smith, London.

Dreams of Here, with Andrjez Jackowsky and

Nightfire, Lyndsey Ingram, London.

Julian Bell, Brighton Museum and Art Gallery.

Atlantica, Lyndsey Ingram, London.

Large Printworks, Where Where Gallery, Beijing, China.

2019

Voyage North and other Woodcuts, Belfast Print

Night Animals, Flowers, London.

Studio Gallery, Northern Ireland.

Lunar Voyage, St Mary’s University, Halifax Canada.

Deep North. Selected Prints, 2004-2019, Glasgow

2011

Print Studio Gallery.

Edgeland, Eagle Gallery, London.

The Making of Poetry, Flowers and Adam Nicolson, celebrating Nicolson’s book published

2009

by William Collins.

Never Far Inland, Grenfell Art Gallery, Memorial University, Newfoundland Canada.

2017 Lunar Voyage, Flowers New York and London.

2006 Plural: New Work, Paul Kane Gallery, Dublin.

2015 Trajectory of a Romantic, Bridport Arts Centre.

2005

Wall, Window, World, Flowers, London.

Journey Through Newfoundland: New Paintings,

With Monograph by Julian Bell, published by

Eagle Gallery.

Lund Humphries.

Travel: New Work, Studio 21 Fine Art, Halifax, Canada.

2014

2004

Hypnagogic, Flowers, New York.

Works on paper, Eagle Gallery, London.

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2003 Homeland: New Paintings, Eagle Gallery, London.

2000 New Paintings and Prints, Redfern Gallery, London.

1999 Pelleas & Melisande and Flight: Prints, Paintings and Tapestries, Glyndebourne Festival, Sussex.

New Tapestries, Redfern Gallery, London.

Paintings and Prints, Deutsche Bank, London.

1998 Geography: New Paintings, Eagle Gallery, London.

Lido: Etchings, Drypoints and Monoprints, Redfern Gallery, London.

1997

New Paintings, Redfern Gallery, London.

1995

Breathing Again, Eagle Gallery, London.

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Selected Collections

Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

Scripps Women’s Centre, San Diego, USA.

British Museum, Collection of Prints

NSCAD collection, Nova Scotia.

and Drawings, London.

The Groucho Club, London.

Yale Centre for British Art, USA.

DLA & Partners.

British Copyright Council.

Bank of Montreal, Toronto.

Deutsche Bank.

Art Gallery of Nova Scotia.

The Conquest Hospital, Hastings.

Art Gallery of Newfoundland and Labrador.

Chelsea and Westminster Hospital.

Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

Chinese Fine Art Academy, Beijing.

Towner Gallery and Museum, Eastbourne.

The Royal London Hospital.

Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Prints

St Mary's University, Nova Scotia.

and Photographs Collection, Paris, France.

Clifford Chance, London.

The Library of Congress Prints and

Dorset County Hospital.

Photographs Collection, Washington

Merrill Lynch, Bank of America, London.

DC, USA.

Minneapolis Institute of Art.

The New York Public Library.

University of Washington Medical

Pallant House, Chichester.

Centre, Seattle, USA.

Brighton Museum and Art Gallery.

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Selected Residencies & Prizes

2019 – 2021 Josef Albers Residency, USA. Associate Artist Glyndebourne.

2018 Aldeburgh Festival Artist in Residence.

2017 V&A Print Prize, 2016 International Print Biennale.

2014 – 2015 14/15 Season at ENO, Artist in Residence.

2005 Residency to Newfoundland and Labrador, through the Art Gallery of Newfoundland and Labrador and support from the Canada Council, with a placement at the St. Michael's Print Workshop in St. John's.

The RA London Print Fair Prize, Royal Academy Summer Show.

2004 Jerwood Drawing Prize 2004.

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Picture credits:

Published by Lyndsey Ingram 20 Bourdon Street

Cover image: Deep End, edition variable

London W1K 3PL

reduction woodcut, 2020. (Detail) T. +44 (0)20 7629 8849

Artwork photography by Antony Medley

E. info@lyndseyingram.com

and Leigh Simpson

W. lyndseyingram.com

All works © 2020 Tom Hammick,

First published in the UK in 2020

All rights reserved Bridgeman Images

© 2020 Lyndsey Ingram Text © 2020 Emma Hill ISBN 978 1 8382126 1 2 All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of Lyndsey Ingram.

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