I’ve drawn an explanatory legend and the info is as follows (click on Jane’s desk to enlarge):

1. Large print for possible collaged monoprints—getting a feeling for the scale. (Jane Hammond Prints)

2. Favorite tchotchke, ceramic devil head. Very broken and totally glued back together—a devil in shreds.

3. Making some photos in which the “subjects” are photographing themselves. Borrowed this old squeeze bulb from the “Soho Photographer” James Dee. (Jane Hammond Photography)

4. Xmas gift from my sister-in-law—20 volume set on Luther Burbank. Love that very early and bad color photography.

5. I have a small dice collection This one is cast iron. The one on the Burbank books is a salt cellar. See Ricky Jay and Rosamond Purcell (Dice: Deception Fate and Rotten Luck)

6. Fraction of a banana.

7. Glass cream pitcher from a farm at my local green market. (Milk Thistle Farm) With an Ostrich feather, undyed. I use these to build moth antennas for my butterfly maps. (Jane Hammond Works on Paper)

8. Buddha candle, half burned down. Form meets entropy.

9. Doll eyeball charm. Note loop at top. Purchased from Lo and Behold—they have great things. (Lo and Behold Antiques)

10. Three Chinese year of the coins. From Pearl River Mart (Pearl River Mart)

11.Tootya—a CD of great collagy music from Lebanese composer and saxophonist Toufic Farroukh. Toufic and his brother and their wives found my work on Artnet one night and asked me if he could use it for the CD cover. His friend and fellow musician Moe Hamzah and I worked together over the Internet. Moe in Beirut and me in NYC to alter my photograph to include Toufic in it. Toufic’s music is great. (Toufic Farroukh)

12 A stack of Xeroxes representing proofs of 2 photos I’m making right now.

Jane Hammond has had twelve solo exhibitions in New York, ten solo exhibitions in other American and European cities and twenty solo museum exhibitions throughout the United States. Her work has been written about in the New York Times, Artforum, Aperture, Art in America, The New Yorker, Art on Paper, Modern Painters, Art News, Art & Antiques, BOMB Magazine and elsewhere. Her work is now held in over fifty public collections. Ms. Hammond lives in New York City where she is represented by Galerie Lelong. (*full resume here)

FROM YOUR DESKS: How do you work?

JANE HAMMOND: I work intuitively out of a theoretical framework.

FYD: The items on your workspace (banana, coins, cream pitcher, Luther Burbank set), do they resemble your art, in that they are different and random but share a narrative?

JH: You are right they are different, but with the exception of (only) two dice-driven work in the early nineties I’ve never made anything random. As for the narrative, it starts when the things come together.

I find the net thrilling. I think if Minimalism had not already been invented it would not be born now!

FYD: How do you keep your hands in so many forms (collage, painting, drawing…) and do you prefer one medium over another?

JH: Keeping my hands in so many forms of collage is natural to me. I prefer variety and multiplicity and variability. It is the consistent “signature style” that would feel unnatural to me.

FYD: Talk about your childhood around 1960. Did you keep notebooks or sketchbooks, perhaps clippings, with information that you refer back to?

JH: One thing that I did was make a string and stake grid in the woods behind our house. It was about 50’ by 50’—I think I must have gotten the idea from seeing a surveyor. I made a little notebook and catalogued everything inside the square I had sectioned off: the kinds of rocks, bugs, leaves, etc.

FYD: When you “cheekily” identify yourself as a “hybrid of Sol LeWitt and Frida Kahlo,” is that through colour, tone, shapes, identity?

JH: The cheeky simile was an attempt to describe my work as both systematic and expressive. On and off it still feels pretty relevant to me.

FYD: How is meaning in your work created?

JH: Although I have described my “system” of working as a “semiotic genome project” in the end the creation of meaning in the work feels pretty mysterious to me. It is not something I can make happen at will.

One thing that I did was make a string and stake grid in the woods behind our house.

FYD: Do you feel we are overly inundated with imagery, technology, media. Is it overkill or can we compartmentalize?

JH: I think it is a very exciting time. I find the net thrilling. I think if Minimalism had not already been invented it would not be born now!

FYD: Do you roll your dice?  

JH: I do not roll dice except for the two paintings I mentioned earlier. They each had 400 rollings of the dice required before I could begin.

(Jane Hammond Untitled (241, 157, 10, 92, 4, 272, 49, 237, 178, 268, 171, 267, 131, 147, 136, 64, 40) 1996 76” x 70” Oil on canvas Collection of the Whitney Museum of American

ArtBulletin Board (Pink Parasol) 2006 34” x 48” x 2.5” Gouache, water color, India ink, digital printing, silver mylar, fabric, cotton thread, cotton string, horsehair and glitter on various archival papers Private collection, Barcelona Spain

Untitled (Red Frog) 2000 29” x 32” Ink and watercolor on Gampi paper Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Happiest on Your Hands 2003 70” Diameter Oil and mixed media on canvas Collection of the Oak Park Public Library, Oak Park, IL)

Visit Jane Hammond for her paintings, Unique Works on Paper, Photography, Prints and Fallen Project and News.