Press release
Holding is Tom Hammick’s fifth solo painting exhibition at the Eagle Gallery
and celebrates a fourteen-year collaboration with the space, since he first
exhibited here in 1994.

Hammick’s recent subject matter is autobiographical in its depiction of the
land and seascape around his home in East Sussex but it broadens to
encompass one of the most consistent themes in painting in its investigation
of the human relationship to place and space.

Initiated by a major large-scale image: ‘Nocturnal: Paintings seen from a
Garden’ (of the artist’s studio lit up at night with paintings seen in every
window), the new works are fragments of an observed world that are
transformed and made emblematic.

Figures are shown in fields, tending to their gardens, standing at the
thresholds of their dwellings. A recurrent motif of mother and child,
bending over a vegetable patch or playing under a blossom tree, hints at the
easy intimacy of shared activity. Elsewhere solitary figures are set against
a landscape that seems to continue far across the edge of picture plane,
while on an uninhabited, night-time road the reflective arrows on a chevron,
point towards the darkness ahead.

The emotional complexity of these paintings is conveyed as much by
colour as by the imagery. Hammick’s palette has darkened
and deepened and the new work gives rise to startling conjunctions
of oranges and reds, thunderous mauves and purples. In the poignant
‘Garden II’ three empty flowerbeds are left as bare canvas against various
shades of shimmering green. A single figure stands in lonely contemplation,
back turned towards the viewer. It is a remarkably evocative image made by the simplest means, for Hammick’s pictures are everyday moments, common to each
of us, transformed through the process of painting into images that speak of what it is to be human.

Works in the exhibition will be available for viewing online at
www.emmahilleagle.com and www.tomhammick.com, from 10 September.

If you would like further information or images please contact the Eagle
Gallery on 020 7833 2674