Denise de Cordova & Tom Hammick
13 September – 15 October 2023
Wood Walkers is a collaborative exhibition that brings together ceramics and sculpture by Denise de Cordova with paintings and large-scale woodcuts by Tom Hammick.
Both artists have often spoken of the inspiration they find in wildernesses, woods and frontier environments. Each explores ideas about identity and our human connection to landscape. Sharing a mutual passion for the forested Pacific North West and the beings that might inhabit the spaces between the trees, their current work is suggestive of mythological and shamanistic figures, living in solitude, at one with nature.
Following studio visits earlier this year the artists established a dialogue through which they have created new works that bear the traces of each other’s approach to narrative, colour and mark-making.
De Cordova’s recent series of ceramics (some that depict naked women communing with animals) are intricately glazed with a mesh of tiny marks that bring to mind the touch of a painter’s brush, or the stitches of embroidery. Her carved wooden sculpture, The Pensivity of Night Fires, has taken on the vibrant palette of Hammick’s nocturnal scenes, whilst his new woodcut Garden in a Time of Loss carries a shadow that is suggestive of her female protagonists. Tiny, jewel-like, oil on panel paintings take motifs directly from de Cordova’s sculptures: the glowing embers of forest bonfires, ethereal figures moving through the trees.
Denise de Cordova (b. 1957, UK) trained at Brighton Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art, London. She was a Rome Scholar at the British School of Rome from 1983-84, where her interest in the object as an embodiment of mythic narratives originated. She was the Henry Moore Foundation Fellow at Camberwell School of Art from 1984-85 and has works in private and public collections including the British Museum and Jesus College, Cambridge. Recent exhibitions include Form & Vessel, Eagle Gallery, London (2022), Treewilder, a commission for Barnwell Country Park / Fermywoods Contemporary Art (2022) and The Disoeuvre, Ramsgate (2022).
Tom Hammick (b. 1963, UK) studied Art History at Manchester University and trained at Camberwell School of Art, London and Nova Scotia College of Art & Design, Canada. He has won numerous prizes and residencies including Associate Artist Glyndebourne (2019) and Aldeburgh Music (2018). His work is held in many public collections including the British Museum, the New York Public Library and Yale Center for British Art. In 2016 he co-curated Towards Night at the Towner Gallery, Eastbourne. Recent solo exhibitions include Being Here, Project 78, St. Leonards (2023) and My Sister’s Garden, Lyndsey Ingram Gallery, London (2022).
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