Pace Prints presents Botanical Collages by Jane Hammond, an exhibition of the artist’s newest monoprints. In the fourteen unique graphic works Hammond combines several printmaking techniques and papers to create colorful, thoughtful arrangements of flowers, insects and birds in a variety of vases, pots and baskets. Each monoprint is also a unique size, some measuring 60 x 41”, 50 x 38”, 31 x 23”, and others 48 x 32”, 26 x 20” and 17 x 12”. The prints will be on view from 1 April – 8 May 2010 at Pace Prints located at 32 East 57th Street, 3rd floor. The artist will be present at a public opening, Thursday, 1 April, 6-8 p.m.
Jane Hammond’s visual dictionary is vast. Over the course of her career she has collected images from biology and botany texts, children’s books, books on puppetry, phrenology and religion. In her paintings, drawings and prints, Hammond removes these images from their original contexts and reinterprets them in amusing and thought provoking ways. It is the idea of assembling disparate elements into a deliberate composition that inspires her.
In her series of botanical collages featured in the upcoming exhibition at Pace Prints, Hammond follows the same method of “collection” to reframe pieces of nature and history into her own larger than life arrangements. During her residency at Dartmouth College in 2006 Hammond explored the rare book collection of the Medical Library, sifting through historical medical and science texts to amass an assortment of flowers, branches, fruits, seedpods, birds and insects to add to her glossary. She also gathered images from old seed catalogues, early taxonomic studies as well as contemporary sources such as Flickr.com. Hammond formed a lexicon of vessels to draw from: Assyrian, Phoenician, Chinese and Japanese vases to American Indian pots and reed baskets. Each flower, branch, bird or vase was created using more than one print medium. For example; to create a Greek vase, Hammond printed a linocut on digitally generated birch bark. She then worked with lithograph, silkscreen, rubber stamp and etching to make a tulip, poppy or hummingbird and added hand coloring in watercolor or gouache. She also carefully considered the paper to which each botanical composition is affixed, and used not only different colors of paper but handmade papers and papers from her personal cache which she collaged together. This meticulous preparation of components for the prints, allowed Hammond to decide quickly what to include or omit in her creations.
With all of the pieces laid out before her, Hammond assembles each collage just as a floral arrangement is made. She chooses the background paper, then a container for the flowers and finally the flowers themselves. Although the composition may swiftly translate from her mind to the paper, there are no hasty decisions in the final configuration of these collages. Hammond arranges and rearranges the flowers and foliage until she is pleased with the image before committing to them with glue to the paper.
Much like the Japanese art of flower arranging, ikebana, Hammond extracts order out of the chaos of nature to produce uncommon yet beautiful botanical collages.