TOM HAMMICK: Travels through Newfoundland
13 October - 11 November 2005

Travels through Newfoundland is Tom Hammick’s sixth solo show in association with the Eagle Gallery and revisits the landscapes and seascapes of Canada - a country which was the subject of his first exhibition with the Gallery in 1995.

The recent paintings and a related suite of etchings and drypoints are the results of a three month residency at the Art Gallery of Newfoundland and
Labrador, sponsored by AGNL and the Canadian Arts Council. The residency enabled him to visit the National Parks of Terra Nova and Gross Morn, as well as many remote coastal areas along the eastern shore of this most recent Canadian
province.

Hammick’s work celebrates the raw, frontier quality of a rarely visited landscape and the proud, isolated communities there whose economies are largely
dependent on rapidly depleting stocks of cod and crab which are fished around its coast.

The paintings convey Newfoundland’s dramatic terrain and reflect the feeling of a community that is shifting away from the traditional employment of the fishing industry and turning to tourism in order to survive: an empty wharf at night where the fishing fleet has been reduced to one vessel or a man selling family heirlooms from a lay-by, to get his household through the winter.

The exhibition illustrates how Hammick explores his subjects through interweaving media: a painted image inspires a series of etchings or drypoints whilst at the same time the linear contours of a woodcut inhabit a canvas. At this year’s Royal Academy Summer Exhibition Hammick was awarded the London Original Print Fair Award for the most outstanding print and for his contribution to printmaking in the last ten years.

The new sequence of etchings were made at St Michael’s Print Shop in Newfoundland.