O,o,o,o.
(2024)
Installation
Exhibited at Chemist Gallery, Lewisham, London
Ross Hammond has moved into Chemist. In the front gallery, large walls lean against the gallery’s own, uprooted and remodelled on Hammonds’ family home and collective working-class 80’s - 90’s domestic decor. They’re treated
with wallpaper and paint, ornamented with coving and skirting. Sections have been cut into, ripped open or disassembled to reveal their own fabrication and hidden layers of found and imagined objects and imagery. A miniature model of Hammonds’ childhood home, a marching battalion and a barren countryside.
O, o, o, o. explores what is lost or forgotten and what we chose to remember. Idealised images of England are stashed away, displayed and hoarded, appearing through collector and hobbyist passion within painting, decorative plates and model making. These assortments adorn twee images of blacksmiths at work, glorifications of colonial explorations and locomotive travel.
In the back room of the house, on the pull down bed an ageing mediaeval period costume from Shakespheres’ Henry IV BBC production sits ready to be put on, while a voice from the adjoining bathroom is rehearsing. Elsewhere in the guest room, the usual smiling face of Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends have turned angry or upset, set in amongst tools of labour and industry.
Duality and contradictory stories play out in this forced domestic mash up, both front stage and back. The title ‘O, o, o, o.’ taken from numerous Shakespeare plays, is the last voice of the tragic quest. ‘O’ Brian Dilllon writes ‘is surely nothing more or less than the vocal expression, precisely, of silence.’
(2024)
Installation
Exhibited at Chemist Gallery, Lewisham, London
Ross Hammond has moved into Chemist. In the front gallery, large walls lean against the gallery’s own, uprooted and remodelled on Hammonds’ family home and collective working-class 80’s - 90’s domestic decor. They’re treated
with wallpaper and paint, ornamented with coving and skirting. Sections have been cut into, ripped open or disassembled to reveal their own fabrication and hidden layers of found and imagined objects and imagery. A miniature model of Hammonds’ childhood home, a marching battalion and a barren countryside.
O, o, o, o. explores what is lost or forgotten and what we chose to remember. Idealised images of England are stashed away, displayed and hoarded, appearing through collector and hobbyist passion within painting, decorative plates and model making. These assortments adorn twee images of blacksmiths at work, glorifications of colonial explorations and locomotive travel.
In the back room of the house, on the pull down bed an ageing mediaeval period costume from Shakespheres’ Henry IV BBC production sits ready to be put on, while a voice from the adjoining bathroom is rehearsing. Elsewhere in the guest room, the usual smiling face of Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends have turned angry or upset, set in amongst tools of labour and industry.
Duality and contradictory stories play out in this forced domestic mash up, both front stage and back. The title ‘O, o, o, o.’ taken from numerous Shakespeare plays, is the last voice of the tragic quest. ‘O’ Brian Dilllon writes ‘is surely nothing more or less than the vocal expression, precisely, of silence.’
