Jane Hammond’s collages at the Garden Museum are vibrant, intricate and uncannily alive. Bringing together flowers, grasses, seeds, insects and birds from decades of printed and painted matter, Hammond creates spectacular arrangements that feel both historical and contemporary. Rooted in tradition yet radically inventive, these works reimagine the great lineage of flower painting for our own unsettled age. A committed gardener at her home in Massachusetts, Hammond’s knowledge of plants, flora and fauna is at the heart of this body of work; on display at a British institution for the first time.
A celebrated American artist whose work is held in major museums in the United States and abroad, Hammond describes her practice as “collecting found information and transforming it.” A painter, printmaker, photographer and sculptor as well as a master collagist, she gathers imagery from broad sources, including old calendars, botanical engravings, textiles, wrapping papers and digital archives. Each fragment carries what she calls an “embedded sense of time.” Reassembled, they generate a charged interplay between harmony and friction, unity and dislocation.
The new collages look back to the 17th-century Dutch masters, including Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder and Jan van Huysum, whose lavish bouquets combined blooms that would never naturally flower together. Like those paintings, Hammond’s works revel in illusionism while embracing artifice. Her vases - drawn from Chinese ceramics, Pre-Columbian silver cups, Campbell’s soup cans and ancient tiles - anchor compositions that are botanically impossible yet visually persuasive. The result is a chorus of cultivated contradictions: fragility and abundance, beauty and decay, tension and balance.
Hammond also extends a rich female lineage of botanical art and paper practice, from Rachel Ruysch to the 18th-century cut-paper innovator Mary Delany, whose “paper mosaicks” astonished contemporaries with their scientific precision. Like Delany, Hammond is a virtuoso of the blade, layering and trimming hundreds of elements into surfaces that hover between painting and low relief. Though the works appear spontaneous, they are the product of prolonged experimentation. Elements are placed, removed and reconsidered until a precarious equilibrium is achieved. A final touch of watercolour may intensify a petal’s blush or deepen a twig’s green.
At a moment of ecological precarity, Hammond’s teeming arrangements take on renewed urgency. The profusion of exotic birds and blossoms evokes an Edenic plenitude yet also prompts the question of what may be lost. Echoing the vanitas tradition embedded in early flower painting, these collages hold beauty in suspension, preserving it even as they acknowledge its fragility.
The works on display at the Garden Museum are both sumptuous and searching: celebrations of biodiversity, memory and survival. Through her dazzling orchestration of found images, Hammond renews a centuries-old genre, affirming the enduring power of art to gather, transform and safeguard the fleeting wonders of the natural world.
To coincide with the opening of this show, a new publication on this body of work, titled Chocolate Cosmos, String of Pearls, published by Hurtwood Press, will be released and available to purchase through the Garden Museum.
