About The Artist
Paci Hammond spent her early childhood in rural Vermont, where she developed a profound connection with nature, imagination and solitude. Growing up, she was fortunate to have parents interested in the world and the arts. As a young adult, she pursued her interests in community-focused endeavors: food activism, radio production, a multicultural camp for children, and teaching. She currently works as a children’s librarian in Oakland, California. The rest of her time is spent painting, dancing, gardening, eating well, and loving her family and friends.
In response to an urgent mid-life call from her “artself”, Paci began painting in 1997. With the guidance of several mentors, she has found her way and her terroir: shapes, colors, textures, the representational, the dreamscape, the abstract. She loves to build up surfaces, erode them, paint them, and sometimes, erode them again. Playing in the mud, she is Maker, Creator, and Destroyer.
Artist’s Statements
“Creating art reveals to the artist that which is unconsciously known, bringing forth a new understanding of the Self. I play and explore to discover that deeper layer, through the making of surfaces, drawings from nature and dreams, and allowing elements to emerge on their own. This conversation between the deliberate and the accidental, the editor and the creator, yields work that opens the eye, and hopefully, the soul.”
“A painting may begin with an image in my mind, from a photograph or drawing, or merely the suggestions of paint drippings on the texture. From there, a dialogue, or maybe a battle emerges, between the painting and myself. Breakthroughs come in surrender and mistakes. This, along with some great world-beat dancing, is my spiritual and devotional practice. “
On Textures:
“Who has not been enthralled by textures and surfaces? From an airplane window, we marvel at the dendritic patterns of streams and rivers forming wrinkled hills, great alluvial fans streaming from mountain into desert, the rolling rhythm of basin and range, and the strange black mass rising from the ochre-and calcium-rich wastelands somewhere in the arid west. At the edge of the ocean, we are drawn to the time-worn cracks in a basalt boulder, those ephemeral waves of sand and cloud, the trickles and swirls of reflective water. On a deserted street, the decrepit walls of the old buildings seduce us: bony wood meets rusted bolts meet veiny artifacts of tile and the flaking mortar beneath. We run our hands over bone and bark, stucco and rusty steel, absorbing the changes from smooth concave to rough edge. We bear witness to the great power of wind, water, heat, and time, in the transformation of what appears immutably solid.”