Gilberd Marriott Galleries - Shane Hammond artist statement

Gilberd Marriott Gallery - new paintings by Shane Hammond - Spirit of Now

The exhibition will open on 5th December 2008, 5pm-7pm, and will run until 20th February 2009.

Shane Hammond in his studio, © Shane Hammond 2008

Spirit of Now - new works by Shane A. Hammond - Artist's Statement

I am a self taught artist from New Zealand's South Island. I was born and raised for my first fifteen years in Nelson and spent a subsequent twelve years in Christchurch. I currently reside in Wellington. I come from a Scottish and Maori background, from Takaka on my mother's side and of Scottish and Spanish descent on my father's side. I have spent the last two decades exploring the expressive form of painting, and have, to this point of 2OO8, been mostly an independent artist outside of the gallery scene, showing in alternative spaces.

Having painted my way through Europe for a few years from 2OO3, my travels have helped me to view and construct a narrative in my work. I have been looking firstly towards similarities and differences within the frame of my NZ identity, and secondly, how the NZ identity fits within the wider global context. I currently have work in collections in NZ, Spain, France, Italy and London.

In this body of work, Spirit of Now, rendered in bitumen, white enamel and road paint, words such as Now, Mind, Known, Is, Heart, Open, and Experiential have been combined with the numerals from the date O8/O8/O8, signifying the day on which the seed of these ideas began on in a two-week journey I took from Wellington to Auckland via Taranaki.

Numbers live forever and I like that about them. Numbers also may be symbolically utilised for ordered, arbitrary and random use, and the way they may be used for/to systematically order the dates and times of collective importance and significance, such as recent national and international events. They also hold interest to me in the day to day function of numbers within our lives such as the physical number of seats built in the Chinese olympic arena and the ripples that are created from that. Also, the numbers of votes cast in the US and NZ elections and the number of numbers printed (or not) on our bank statements.

Some of these paintings include the lazy 8 symbol, signifying infinity, captured lying horizontally, and some in the numeral form of 8, 88 or 888. Symbolically, for me, the figure 8 represents the spirit-identity of NOW. I play with the idea that this numeral exists in an unseen realm; it acts as a lens portraying a snapshot of a collective spirit and a modern time of consciousness, in the hope that the modern God of convenience, wealth, materialism and individualism be reviewed and challenged with a new, considered and sharpened sense of shared reason.

In using the numeral zero, partly as an ancient ideogram that symbolised the world, together with different arrangements of letters, the zeros / O's form words that provoke internal and external questions in the context of the words' meaning.

For me, in this time, I see these forces of spirit, energy, reason, and action as necessary tools in developing an accountable and responsible 'way of being' in regards to the problems and solutions of the now, and on the Earth in which we live in its spirit.

It is easy enough now to see the deep concerns & awareness of disharmony we face in the world. I think there's a need to re-harness the power of symbolism to cut through the fog of social conditioning and to get back to clear communication. Maybe some of the most powerful symbols are yet to be born.