Tom Hammick - flowing and flown, a survey show

We are delighted to present a survey show of 15 years of work by renowned Sussex artist Tom Hammick. His work is held in various public and private collections worldwide, including the British Museum, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London and Pallant House Gallery, Chichester. He was the 2020-2021 associate artist at Glyndebourne.

The title for this exhibition, Flowing and Flown, comes from a line in Elizabeth Bishops 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 Lifes like that, and also death Tom Hammick, September 2026