Workaround

I’m at the show with someone who’s visiting from somewhere warmer. She keeps complaining about the weather (Scotland, summer, blustery yet dry) and it’s irking me to the point that I’d like to snip at a coffee cup like that—like the ones in Charlie Hammond’s ‘Studio Blooms’ (2022): muddy-bottomed takeaway coffee cups, coffee drunk then reused for mixing paint, repurposed. The walls of the cups are snipped to blooms around their edge. Glued into the canvas they become ocular peering flowers. This is the sort of random but methodical studio act that appeases, kills time, probably feels and sounds satisfying, and might get you out of a mood or a rut. A workaround to artist’s block. The title of another piece with similar flower-cups–’Cherubs, striking. The creep of life with four blooms (version 2)’ (2022), speaks as though these paper flowers have grown involuntarily. The blooms are flowers, but such phrasing also makes me think of how mould blooms at the base of mugs unattended and forgotten in a studio. That thin skin that rests on top of a dreg, that grows from it. As well as things that bloom, ants creep into the show, rows of specimens pinned at intervals.

Hammond’s titling throughout is glib and playful. In ‘Stop/start/road re-arrangement, the direction isn’t clear’ (2022), sections of painted tarmac road are cut into floppy paper specimens then collaged onto canvas. These roads become redundant, their linearity undone. Another road piece’s title is a mouthful: ‘The world is or isn’t your playground. Look at it or don’t from a fresh perspective and you’ll find opportunities everywhere or nowhere or somewhere. Rug with roads’ (2022). The language of advertisement or perhaps life advice drained of context, poked fun at.

The artist’s studio is close at hand, all its accoutrements present: brushes, scissors, mugs, canvas, clay. But, here it is in their banality rather than in any romantic sense. You have a cup of tea, move things about, hoover, work gets made. On the staircase going up to the exhibition is a print of a large fabric collage with a studio shot of works in progress, a vacuum cleaner, its hose arching up in the foreground, and a broom flat on the floor. This photo’s overlaid with cut-out painted leaves. There’s an even value system here, with quotidian tasks of maintenance and living presented on a plane with acts of creation.

In Workaround, Hammond explores themes of public and private space through methods of play and collage. Alongside a selection of recent and older works, the artist has chosen pieces from the Hunterian collection, which contextualise his visual, material, and thematic interests. One side of the floorplan to the exhibition shows only Hammond’s works and titles, while the other, the same floorplan, defines the gallery collection works. In reality all of them are jumbled together, so viewing the exhibition requires a regular flipping of the gallery hand-out. This feels ludic, like a treasure map that you have to reorient as part of the encounter, our hand-eye-mind link underlined.

The play between Hammond’s work and the work of others enriches both. At one end of the room, a piece of framed fabric has subtly darker graphic sections. It’s labelled, ‘Sun-faded fabric from Hunterian display case formerly containing artist’s tools belonging to JM Whistler’. Artist tools are present again, here in the outlines of brushes, two palettes. This piece is somewhere in the between-space of Hammond’s own work and the museum collection—it is not by an artist. This inclusion in Workaround makes overt a strong relationship to image making, as it relates to (and is changed by) historic developments in printmaking and photography, but also to play and happenstance. This piece, a document to light and its lack, an unmeant photograph of an artist’s tools, is a by-product of the life of the museum. Much like Hammond’s work is a by-product of life in the studio: of a sustained studio practice, of the daily, of image making, of play. Workaround is also, just as importantly, a testament to ‘the creep of life.’

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Kate Morgan is a writer and editor based in Glasgow. They care about attending to the quotidien as a site of research and a way of thinking through. Their writing has been featured by Sticky Fingers, Pilot Press, Design Exhibition Scotland and Hedera Felix. They also co-produce Fortified, a journal that prioritises unwieldy writing on food and eating.

Charlie Hammond: Workaround, Hunterian Art Gallery, until 16 October 2022