" I am a British artist born in 1963 living in London.
While linked to a romantic tradition of love and loss, searching for poetic meaning in the everyday, my work shares sensibilities with contemporary narrative forms found especially in opera, theatre and film. While being moved by Confucian ideas around place and home... what is home, is it possible even to have a home? With images of forest cabins, shacks, tents, modernist houses, night studios, compounds, even boats adrift at sea as symbols of sanctuary and shelter, the influence of thinkers and environmentalists like Henry David Thoreau and William Burroughs have shifted my images towards more existential concerns such as an attempt at following a simpler life, to the backdrop of climate catastrophe and crisis. It is the depiction of living things, the wonderment of all living things, almost as an antidote to and protest of current oligarchical shifts in governance, that has become central to the work. How else can I paint and print, unless it is a celebration of life as a quiet defiance as our Earth is economically commodified at every level. "
Tom Hammick was awarded the V&A print collection prize at the International Print Biennale in September 2016. His work is held in many major public collections including the British Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Yale Centre for British Art, The Library of Congress, New York Public Library, The Minneapolis Museum of Fine Art, Pallant House and The Towner collection and The Tate.