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TOM HAMMICK: NIGHTFIRE
29th September - 13th November 2020 -
‘It’s as if the world, its creatures, the insects living in my studio and shepherd's hut, the leaves thrashing around like moving castles above my studio, the wildlife in the pond and paddock, the night sky, the barn owl and pipistrelle bats, both flying at dusk. All this is somehow in me and me in the work, like us in lockdown, so much more has been revealed to so many of us’
- Tom Hammick
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Tom Hammick - Nightfire
29th September - 13th November 2020
Lyndsey Ingram is pleased to present new etchings, woodcuts and paintings by British artist Tom Hammick in the gallery space at 20 Bourdon Street. The gallery's first project with Hammick in the spring, Atlantica, was taken online and experienced virtually. The team are delighted to now be able to share Hammick's new body of work in person.
Nightfire will be a selection of work made within the last 18 months. These prints and paintings are connected by a stirring undercurrent that crackles to the surface as vivid outlines and surges across the work in expressive striations of colour. Hammick revisits compositions that have their roots in operatic narratives, poetry, film and literature. He explores what the different mediums of oil paint on canvas, woodcut and etching bring to each new iteration.
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Tom HammickNarrow Road to the Deep North, 2019Edition variable etching with aquatint and chine collé.
Signed in pencil and numbered 15 from the edition of 30.68 x 56 cm (26 3/4 x 22 1/8 in) -
Tom HammickTamino in the Wilderness, 2020Edition variable reduction woodcut printed in colours. Signed in pencil and numbered from the edition of 14.119 x 89 cm (46 7/8 x 35 1/8 in)
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While Hammick’s familiar subjects of his family and the forested nature and sea beyond his studio reappear, the new works appear charged with an almost electric energy. Natural phenomena that normally appear in his work, such as the darkness of the sky, became much more intense during the past months. This inspired the artist to look afresh at the world around him and to focus even more on depicting the individual within the natural world.
As his 2019 publication with Adam Nicholson, The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, the Wordsworths and their Year of Marvel attests, Hammick has long been a passionate admirer of the Romantic tradition – in particular Coleridge’s ideas about recognising a pattern of the universe in nature. Affected both by the drama and solitude of the past few months, Hammick has sought to see the world in the everyday objects of his studio and local landscape, to glimpse the universal in the specific.
In the work on display at Lyndsey Ingram, Hammick reimagines his daily universe in an almost otherworldly palette: expressive colours appear as outlines or broad striations, fluctuating between heat and cold, joy and melancholy, taking the viewer on a sensory journey. With reverence for storytelling in all its forms, the new paintings bring his subjects to life with inspiration from epic tales, orchestral scores, and poetry. -
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"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."
- Lyndsey Ingram, from the foreword in Tom Hammick: Nightfire.
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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."- From The Unending Sky by John Masefield
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Tom HammickSky Park, 2020Edition variable reduction woodcut printed in colours.
Signed in pencil and numbered III from the edition of IV.167 x 101 cm (65 3/4 x 39 3/4 in) -
Tom HammickSky Park, 2020Edition variable reduction woodcut printed in colours.
Signed in pencil and numbered I from the edition of II.167 x 101 cm
65 3/4 x 39 3/4 in£ 8,800.00 + VAT
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"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."
- From Tom Hammick: Nightfire by Emma Hill
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EXHIBITION AVAILABLE WORKS
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Additional Available Works
