Over the last five decades, Hammond has forged a materially conscious and process-oriented vocabulary that mobilizes modernist formalism to political ends. In the ’70s, she incorporated fabric remnants into a radical body of textile-based paintings (like her “Floorpieces” from 1973) and sculptures (such as Hunkertime 1979–80) that drew upon traditions associated with women, the domestic sphere, and non-Western cultures. Encoded in the language of abstraction, sociopolitical concerns continue to figure in Hammond’s recent paintings. Working through emblematic processes—including binding, tearing, piecing, patching, and suturing—on almost monochromatic surfaces, paintings such as Patched (2022) and Double Cross I (2021) caution against patterns of violence, and cipher collectivity for disenfranchised voices.
A defining voice in contemporary feminist and queer abstraction, Hammond has received her due in recent years: In 2019 the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum held a 50-year survey of her work and, last year, she was included in the Whitney Biennial. “FRINGE,” a recently opened solo exhibition at SITE Santa Fe on view until May 19, focuses on work produced since 2014, including her series of “Bandaged Grids,” “Chenilles,” “Bandaged Quilts,” and “Crosses.” A.i.A. spoke with Hammond about the processes and material metaphors that have characterized her practice from the 1970s to today.
“FRINGE,” the title of your SITE Santa Fe show, can be read a number of different ways. What does it connote to you?
It’s a verb and a noun. The idea of fringe and fringing has to do with edges and marginalized spaces. Going back to the 1970s, the metaphorical associations of edges as meeting points have interested me and been crucial to the formal strategies that I employ. Are people pushed to the fringes, or do they choose to be there? How do things or people meet at those edges? Is there a tension, a friction, a negotiation? The fringe is not just a passive place. In fact, it is very active and charged. It’s the place that I choose to occupy.
Layers and what is hidden underneath are recurrent themes in your work. How are you thinking about visibility and opacity?
I’m trained as a painter. I work via accumulation. From my fabric work of the ’70s to the work I do now, it’s additive. Whether you call it painting or sculpture, that’s what I do. In my early “Bags” and “Presences,” the hanging strips of paint-saturated cloth are three-dimensional brushstrokes. Accumulation over time, over space—that sense of building from the inside out—is very much about agency and occupying space.
The works of the last 15 years exist in a third space between painting and sculpture. They build up paint slowly and intimately in thick, near-monochrome layers. The painting becomes a metaphor for the body. There was a period where the paintings were a dark phthalo blue, at times looking black or iridescent. The color and surface were fugitive, or what we could call queer. Recent paintings are mostly lighter in color, emphasizing surface incident. Lumps, bumps, protrusions, seams, splits, stains, and grommet holes formally open up the pictorial space. At the same time, they suggest body orifices, or wounds, with the paint acting as a healing poultice. When I wrap a painting, the straps often wrap around the edges to the back. You can think of that as bandaging, binding, bondage, but it is also embracing the painting. It’s about strengthening—like an athlete bandaging a knee.
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