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Valerie Hammond
Traces 51 (Whimsical Mixed Media Drawing of Hands Trailing Botanicals and Vines)

2012

About the Item

"Traces 51" by Valerie Hammond Created in 2012 38 x 25 inches unframed Pigment, Color Pencil, wax, glass beads and thread on Japanese paper Valerie Hammond's approach to her art making involves drawing, photography, printmaking, collage and sewing. This work employs a number of different techniques to create a portrait of sorts; carefully drawn hands emboldened with intricate designs calling to mind the Islamic Hamsa symbol leads a trail of rambling vines that are dappled with collaged leaves and flowers. Glass beads are used to emphasize the center of various flowers. Whimsical, delicate and delightfully feminine, Hammond's work has a timeless quality in its ability to celebrate nature and natural forms. Layering is another essential aspect of my work. Whether this is seen or perceived as physical or contextual, my interest is in combining the literal and emotional qualities that are evoked through the physical process of layering. I begin by collecting ferns and other organic materials, transforming them through drawing and the printmaking process, creating images that marry the ferns with images of the body. These images reflect the uniqueness of individual hands, as well as reveal the tracing of the spirit. The process, in which the image itself is submerged in a tray of heated wax, metaphorically removes the image from the world of the living but paradoxically preserves it indefinitely. The images act as mechanisms to stop time-to document a moment in a person life-an open meditation on portraiture. - Valerie Hammond , 2011 In Valerie Hammond’s series of wax drawings, protection is two-fold: the artist (previously) encases dried flowers and ferns in a thin layer of wax, preserving their fragile tissues long after they’ve been plucked from the ground. In outlining a pair of hands, she also secures a memory, or rather, “the essence of a gesture and the fleeting moment in which it was made.” Centered on limbs lying flat on Japanese paper, the ongoing series dates back to the 1990s, when Hammond made the first tracing “partly in response to the death of a dear friend, whose beautiful hands I often found myself remembering.” She continued by working with family and friends, mainly women and children, to delineate their wrists, palms, and fingers. Today, the series features dozens of works that are comprised of either hands tethered to the dried botanics, which sprout outward in wispy tendrils, or others over layed with thread and glass beads. Although the delicate pieces began as a simple trace, Hammond shares that she soon began to overlay the original drawing with pressed florals, creating encaustic assemblages that “echoed the body’s bones, veins, and circulatory systems.” She continued to experiment with the series by introducing various techniques, including printmaking, Xerox transfers, and finally Photoshop inversions, that distorted the original rendering and shifted her practice. Hammond explains: "The works suddenly inhabited a space I had been searching for, straddling the indefinable boundary between presence and absence, material and immaterial, consciousness and the unconscious. For me, they became emblematic not only of the people whose hands I had traced but of my own evolving artistic process—testimony to the passing of time and the quiet dissolution of memory.".
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