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Home » MSVU Collection » Charlotte Wilson-Hammond: Self-Portrait with Mirror (Tiresias)
Return to search results Charlotte Wilson-Hammond: Self-Portrait with Mirror (Tiresias)Charlotte Wilson-Hammond Self-Portrait with Mirror (Tiresias) 1979 Charlotte Wilson Hammond is a nationally recognized visual artist who has lived and worked in Clam Harbour, Nova Scotia, since 1971. Her work, in a wide variety of media including paint, paper, ink and organic materials, has been exhibited and collected nationally and internationally. Wilson Hammond’s landscape paintings are semi-abstract. She studied under the Toronto figure painter, Graham Coughtry; his influence is evident in her inventive way of suggesting the softness of flesh through analogy to the viscosity and materiality of paint. As a 2nd-wave feminist artist she typically treats the female body as analogous to landscape—thus close to a fecund nature. Amaryllis Cutout #3 was first exhibited at MSVU Art Gallery in 1983 as part of Wilson Hammond’s Primary Flowers exhibition. The artist translates botanical elements into formal visual elements using the primary colours: red, blue and yellow. Turning away from the traditional framed rectangle, she gives the painting the same shape as the flower. Dune, Clam Harbour #3 suggests hiding, huddled nudes or sand spirits. Colours that evoke blood, earth, flesh, and rust blend into each other through her drip technique. The traditional differentiation between foreground, middleground, and background is blurred; the painting begins to lose the sense of landscape, and moves instead towards bodily representations and abstraction. A founding member of Visual Arts Nova Scotia, Wilson Hammond continues to be actively involved in the Nova Scotia art community. She has had two major retrospectives at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, and was the Portia White Award recipient in 2004. KB |