Mount Holyoke College Art Museum Hosts Jane Hammond's Creative World

Thursday, 28 September 2006 08:49

South Hadley, MA - For some children, a back yard is a playground. For others, it is a clue to their destinies.  When Jane Hammond was a little girl, she liked to construct string-grids over the yard behind her childhood home.  She would then spend many happy hours cataloging the yard’s contents.

Hammond grew up to become a renowned artist whose works reflect her life-long fascination with collecting, sorting, and memory.  Along the way, she invented her own visual language, based on 276 images borrowed from books on everything from puppetry to beekeeping.

The Mount Holyoke College Art Museum offers a chance to enter Hammond’s disciplined yet wildly creative world through its special exhibition, Jane Hammond: Paper Work.  On exhibit until 17 December, 2006.

While Hammond made her reputation as a painter, the exhibition showcases her exceptional talents as a paper artist.  Jane Hammond: Paper Work features more than 55 unique paper objects, which make reference to board games, scrapbooks, maps, charts, books, and even three-dimensional costumes. 

“It’s amazing,” said Kate Dalton, the Museum’s Art Advisory Board Fellow, who was busily helping to install Paper Work last week.  “I’ve worked on the show for over a year, and yet I was unprepared for how stunning [Hammond’s] works are.   I’m encouraging everyone I know to come and experience them first hand.”

Hammond has described her intricate collage style as a “semiotic genome project,” underscoring the endlessly varied interactions between image and viewer.

“My intention was to use the lexicon of the 276 images in ‘recombinant’ fashion—think DNA—and let myself make any kind of work of art I wanted with them,” wrote Hammond.

The exhibition’s centerpiece, All Souls (Masindi), is the latest in Hammond’s exquisitely life-like butterfly map series. All who see the map are startled by its delicate verisimilitude.  “Are those butterflies real?” they ask.

Another exhibition highlight is Scrapbook (1000 Yen), a large open book into which is sewn Japanese paper.  Affixed to the two open pages are silhouettes, paper doll-like figures, paper flowers, money, safety pins, paper necklaces, and handmade paper matchbooks.  “Hammond’s work is so thick with storytelling. Every time I look at Scrapbook, I find a subtle reference or sly joke that I hadn’t noticed before,” said Dalton.

Regarding works such as her humorously disorienting Still Life With Seal and Martin House Me, Hammond has written, “For me these drawings are the visual equivalent of thinking out loud.  They begin without a plan and end up as they are.  You could call them free-associative, although it’s increasingly complicated as to what the word ‘free’ means in that context.”

“They are built of different layers and techniques that happen sequentially, and each is an intuitive response to the images, signs, and marks that are there.  At some point all of these rhymes, skips, jumps, consonances, and dissonances hover together in a charged way.  They are like flow charts.  Thinking diagrams. And by thinking I mean everything—cognition, emotion, goosebumps.”

Visit Mount Holyoke College Art Museum at : www.mtholyoke.edu/offices/artmuseum/