Orkney Museum, Kirkwall, Orkney until 24 February

YOU know how M&S in Inverness assumes an importance totally out of proportion if you live in the rural North?

SO when you are catching the bus up the A9 you have to go in and get a wee snack to sustain you whilst you listen to all the Golspie, Helmsdale  and Wick gossip which will swell like big surf around you – and you see a selection of toy shaped rolls with different fillings, and toy shaped boxes of sushi, cunningly marketed as tasters to get you hooked.  You end up getting lots of wee things and only liking one of them – but I guess the marketers know that you’ll buy a really big roll, or even two, with the filling you like next time…

Rik Hammond drawings at Orkney Museum

Anyway, this was in my mind during my wander around Rik Hammond’s work. He has never exhibited in Orkney, though he’s lived here a while – and this is, I think, a taster for the exhibition opening on 18 February at the Pier Arts Centre – sushi perhaps, rather than filled roll.

A neat bit of programming, I’d say. Rik has been appointed Orkney World Heritage Site Artist in Residence, focusing on the disciplines of art and archaeology, and the Pier exhibition will let us see what new work he’s developed over his time on the sites.

In the meantime, we have a series of drawings in pencil, pen, ink and wash, from the past couple of years, and a video of him creating a piece, to the sound of the sea.

‘Drawing’, he tells us in his artist statement, ‘for me, is an instinctive activity akin to the process of thinking. I tend to approach drawing in an experimental way, often treating it as an automatist exercise… enquiry, chance and experiment tend to be the basis for the decisions I make… (I have) little, if any, specific direction in mind.’

Statements of intent like this tend to make my heart sink; they have a vague let’s-shake-the-box-and-see-what-falls-out feel to them that’s a worry.

To read the drawings we proceed past a fine staircase, c.1820, with a long case Dutch clock in a niche – Stanley Cursitor’s paintings decorate the curve of the wall,  – ochres, greens, Orkney landscape colours. The exhibition room itself is painted a fairly pungent c.18^th century green. Hammond’s drawings, which are black and white with subtle wash tints here and there – green, ochre, blue – look at first glance to be rather brutally enclosed, by the background and then, on closer investigation, by the framing.

On the video we see him drawing round a soup plate, then letting go, free hand (it’s speeded up – I wonder about the wisdom of that.). He leaves the work, then re-visits it, washing over organic shapes, adding spiky squiggles or hatching. Of course you’re reminded of Jackson Pollock painting ‘free’ – but Pollock let his bedraggled canvases or paper hang as he left them, bedraggled at the edges.

Rik Hammond drawing

The Australian 20^th century artist Fred Williams also comes to mind – his drawings of You Yangs, Plenty Gorge, and Lysterfield Hills participate in the same random freedom of line – and at the same time pay homage to Aboriginal art and the mythic significance of certain marks and shapes, as signals and messages. Then there’s the late great Cy Twombly – all the marks he made, random and playful as they may have seemed, were bedded firmly in an understanding of the power of the line and its child, the letter.

Hammond is aware that his automatic drawing produces recurring motifs which may or may not be symbols. You can be a Zen master, a Freudian, a Jungian, or a child, and see things in these pieces to which you may want to attach meaning. They’re not a single act of expression – some are layered and scraped; but they do have a joyous simplicity which is very attractive. At its best, it is loose, playful shape making, and the occasional phrase –‘ 13 bodies’, for example – arise out of the picture, rather than being imposed upon it.

The rolling pencil provides us with dots and stutters, cook’s hats, cocks and balls and rabbit’s ears, prows and oars and birds – or not. It doesn’t matter. These random phrases –because that’s what I think they are, are like half a conversation which could be a poem, or a blurred snapshot which reminds you only of how cold your hands were that day; or a sound picture of some rock band.

I am less taken by the severely formal balls, circles and squares, the rulered lines, and a couple of very brooding black and grey studies, charcoal smudged. They don’t have the spontaneity which is this artist’s gift.

I have a real problem too with the framing here. There are some small studies heavily enclosed in pine frames. The artist perhaps liked the interplay between the four different grains surrounding the drawings, and the warm colour, a big band of it enclosing the blue grey Chinese wash and liquid ink shapes. I found it distracting, and thought it drowned the delicate intimacy on the paper.

I had the same problem with a group of circular drawings – like the one in the video. Why not leave an edge, and let us see what happens when the colours splash about over it? Tightly hemmed in a perfect card circle and then bound in a black frame, these lovely wandering pieces seemed trapped somehow, a bit diminished. Maybe it was on purpose. I thought they needed lighter handling.

I’m now very interested to see how Hammond has developed his work from these very personal, intimate studies. A year with archaeologists, watching their disciplines, walking in a landscape full of symbol and myth should bear interesting fruit. I wonder too what being out and about will do to his palette, which here is so subtle as to be almost hidden. As I drove home, a sudden great shaft of light hit the Ring of Brodgar, causing all sorts of extraordinary things to happen to land and sea, and shifting the horizon to boot. I wonder what he’ll make of all that. Not long to wait….

© Morag MacInnes, 2012

Links

• Rik Hammond