“The title for this exhibition, Flowing and Flown, comes from a line in Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, At the Fishhouses. Bishop often shaped each poem with a specific observation from a personal experience of an encounter which later, through her use of a cooler, more removed voice, shifted into a viewpoint that she felt held a truthful statement about the universal. Flowing and Flown refers to knowledge which can be allusive when it represents the big picture of life on our planet. In my own way, and perhaps all artists try to do this, I want to make images that are specific to my own experiences but also conjure a shared emotional response about what it is like to be human, which in turn might add to their universality. Well, that is the dream! To quote Bishop again, from her majestic poem The Moose, I would love to conjure up that fizz of “Life’s like that, and also death”.
I don’t believe in a hierarchy in the arts. In my own practice, painting feeds the woodcuts and etchings, and vice versa. Both print mediums and painting are informed by my drawings made on the hoof, photographs, newspaper cuttings, poems, film stills. More complex imagery often stems from more complex source material, like key themes in operas and plays. A problem arises: how to distil all the information I need into a proscenium that might have a chance of suspending disbelief without it turning into a mashed-up mess.
In my exhibition with Julian, we wanted to showcase a range of work within a fifteen year timespan. We have included one large painting - Atkins Point, Northern Shore - which has a direct link to a woodcut of the same composition. I don’t think the woodcut, with all its painterly surface, could have been made without the influence of the painting, which was made in the studio simultaneously. Nevertheless, print is a get all your ducks in a row back to front kind of thing, versus the seat of your pants immediacy and real time ‘unknowing’ of the painted picture. To attempt to achieve ‘freshness' in the editioned image, a sort of con-trick in the making is required, where one knowingly tries to work out how to achieve freshness! I like the dance of these challenges and interchanges in my own practice, and I hope you can see these lines of enquiry in this exhibition.
Several monumentally sized woodcuts in Julian Pages’s space are interspersed with more book-sized imagery. These woodcuts and etchings link up in scale to a different sort of print solution that can be seen at Pallant House Gallery, a short walk away. A collaboration with the writer Adam Nicolson drove the group of nearly forty images made for his 2019 book, The Making of Poetry.
Most of this series, made on planks cut from fallen timbers from the very trees that surrounded the Wordsworths in the park at Alfoxden in Somerset, is on display at the Print Room in Pallant. These prints became my responses to poems by Coleridge and Wordsworth made during their time in the Quantocks.
Nicolson explored the idea that the poems which emerged from their time together, where friendship was combined with a wonderment at the landscapes they walked through day and night, embodied a political form of writing in place, self and love became fused in a new vision of society, humanity and nature.
Julian is presenting a number of these Making of Poetry woodcuts. An equal share of the proceeds of every sale of these prints will go to Pallant House’s development fund.”
Tom Hammick, September 2026
