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Night sky

Hammick’s research explores narrative, archetypes and space through a range of media, including painting, drawing, etching and woodcuts. This series re-imagines the English landscape using drawings and photographs made on the edge of the Weald in Sussex. Hammick employs a series of recurring elements – the shed, studio or house – and a series of replicated solitary figures. These traverse a panorama in which the visual story extends across flattened minimalist interiors, land or seascapes of imagined places, inviting the viewer to imagine, for each composition, narratives no longer dominated by a single perspectival viewpoint.

Drawing on his residency in China (2010) and his recent research into Japanese woodcut techniques at the British Museum, Night Sky is influenced by Chinese scroll painting; Po Chi-i’s account of inhabiting a thatched hall on Mount Lu and Kamo No Chomei’s description of living in a small hut on Mount Hino; Hokusai’s series of ‘One Hundred Poets’ and ‘One hundred views of Mount Fuji’; Sesshu Toyoi’s Landscape of Ama-no-hashidate; and Ogata Korin’s ‘White and Red Plum Blossoms’ screen.

As a painter and printmaker Hammick employs and overlays the techniques of both. Each variable edition is distinct. Hammick uses ‘found’ boards, incorporating their patternation. This language of mark-making creates a counterpoint to the flat, formal compositional qualities of the prints and their visual stories. The ‘Night Sky’ series has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the New York Print Fair (2012), Flowers Gallery in London (2013), and Galerie Prodromus, Paris 2013.

Hammick won the Nexus Prize (2010) and was shortlisted for the Daiwa prize in 2012. The works now form part of collections at the British Museum, Yale Centre of British Art, the Deutsche Bank Collection, the V&A collection, and important regional collections including Pallant House Chichester and the Towner collection in Eastbourne.

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