Artist ~ Rebecca Hamm
These watercolor paintings depict views of the environment within a 20-mile radius of where I have lived my life. The naturally occurring and humanly constructed environmental changes I have witnessed continue to be fascinating and instructive. The views found here call me to respond to their unsettling beauty and evidence of transformation.
I am particularly drawn to places where nature overcomes and reclaims — gradually or dramatically — imposed human constructs. These images are selected for the paintings because they are autobiographical metaphor.
Energetic marks in the composition create rhythmic structure and reveal interlaced spaces to express nature's wild strength and resilience in response to destructive human intervention. Paper provides a transitory, variable and flexible support to present the connected elements. Color evokes the emotive qualities of natural experience.
These views no longer exist as they once were and these artworks have become memorials, stirring ideas of change and transformation.
Art history is rich with the tradition of pictography, using images to tell a story. In my current works of large pastel paintings on sandpaper, I am interested in telling a story with single images. For instance, a teacup is an icon which embodies the essence of the feminine spirit. It brings to mind a strong tradition of female ceremony. The teacup is a vessel as is the female body. What happens when single images are placed next to one another? Does a specific combination of images change the meaning of the objects? My intention is to explore the emotional content of single objects and to then juxtapose these images with others.
I make beauty from crap. My work is born out of a world of 9-5 exhaustion, too many salty snack foods and rock and roll songs. The studio is a laboratory where I am not so much the scientist but more the lab rat. I am an empty vessel waiting silent commands. My hands and brain are wired to the same invisible unit receiving secret electrical impulses that drive me to compulsively cut, tear, shred, sew and make. My training as a painter kicks in and I instinctively place pieces of color, forms, shapes, value and lines into some sort of aesthetic order. I impose a small amount of control over the work but only so much as to make a barely legible map, a kind of visual sense of the elements; otherwise, the materials dictate to me what they will eventually become. I borrow and steal textures and forms found in nature but don't replicate so much as allude to or quote from them. I coax ordinary materials to transcend into new forms that are a surprise even to me.
The transfer of paint and line to canvas is a spontaneous and personal mark making process for me. I search to express my own energy, space and movement in time through automatic gesture.
My line work is at the base of all my art, like an armature holding it together. Some lines are held by color, some colors hold the lines, some create a separate dimension of their own. With delicate wandering lines or strong bold marks, I like to create fantasy landscapes and organic abstractions. What inspires me may be as simple as the colors in nature or the shape of a cactus thorn. In the moment of drawing, the direct reference is gone and replaced with the freedom of the hand and mind. I often create wire sculptures influenced by my sketches, and my drawings and paintings are in turn informed by these sculptures. This process of dimensional abstraction from to 2-D to the 3-D and back again provides me with endless possibilities.
Kim Tucker's narrative ceramic portraits of her neighborhood respond to the larger state of the world. The nightly struggles of opossums to find food, chain smoking men and noisy exuberant children are the characters of her play. Tucker blurs the lines between the imagined and the real, recording what is around her and at the same time creating narratives.
We live in a technological world and are surrounded by technology's infrastructure. It is visible in the power lines that stretch across our country, in the neon signs on every corner, and invisible in the radio and television waves that envelop us.
Technology marches through our human landscape; it connects us and alienates us at the same time. Even though it is our own creation, technology is ambivalent to us and to the human stories unfolding around it. In my work I focus on these stories, taking place in this landscape.
Raymond Chandler once said, "You can never know too much about the shadow line and the people who walk it." I believe that we all walk this line, in the shadows cast by the machinery of the modern age.
I work in scratchboard, starting with a white clay-coated board, covered with black ink. Fine knives are used to delicately scrape the ink away, creating the image. Working in black and white, I leave it to the viewer to fill in the colors, as well as the emotions, motivations and stories of the characters within.
My work is also influenced by a specific technology: cinema. Each piece is like a single frame from a movie, giving no real clue as to what has and will take place.
Although I have chosen to work without high tech methods, I do not consider myself a Luddite. We rely on science and technology in our daily lives, and often (perhaps misguidedly) rely on it to solve our problems. Our lives have been made better, but at what price?
