Felicity Hammond. Photographs by Hana Knizova
Photographer Felicity Hammond questions the values of art, architecture and society through installations about industrial decay, in a interview taken from SLEEK 51
Hammond’s practice reflects the increasingly conceptual bent of contemporary photography. Her installations of images taken from real life are juxtaposed with sculptures and performances, challenging photography’s claim to truthfulness. Having graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2014, the native Londoner’s mixed media work quickly gained attention. This year she won the British Journal of Photography’s annual prize, and was part of “The Language of Living”, a performance staged in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. “I was always encouraged to push my techniques in terms of what photography can be and examine the boundaries of it,” she says prior to her group show at Berlin’s House of Egorn this September. “Direct to media printing-techniques allow me to print on lots of different surfaces, pushing my practice towards to the sculptural.”
Early in her career, Hammond was fascinated by the virtual worlds created through commercial architectural rendering. “At first glance, these images of luxury living spaces have this kind of sleekness to them,” she says, “but when you really inspect them, they start to really break down; the perspective is wrong, and it’s all warped. They are false promises: seemingly photographs, but they’re not.” This interest in physical space later expanded to other practices outside photography. Today, her work also employs the aesthetics of building sites, retail spaces, and advertising, as she investigates the ways in which photography represents the world while reifying certain values: her immersive dioramas embody aspirational consumerist luxury as an actual spatial experience.
“As soon as photographers start working in other mediums, people question why you’re not using the camera.”
Felicity Hammond. Capital Growth, 2015
For Hammond, the deceptiveness of these digital, 3D mock-ups of buildings reflects the ideological nature of images, and she wishes it received greater attention and theorisation – something her work seeks to stimulate. “These ‘non-photographs’ promise us this better life through regeneration, which actually isn’t true, because these designs are rarely made for the people in the area,” she says. “They’re also constructing a city before it’s even been built, and that’s what’s really interesting to me.”
These issues aren’t foreign to Hammond. She comes from a family of factory workers from East London, an area currently subject to aggressive gentrification, and there is a discernable biographical element in her work. For example, “Restore to Factory Settings” an installation from 2014 featuring blue images of derelict industrial spaces, examines the dismemberment of urban industrial landscapes and their social histories. “It was really more about loss for me than to be a political piece,” she explains. “I associated it much more with the relationship with my dad, I obviously discovered that it’s a global issue.”
Hammond has also been researching the utopian ambitions of architects and theorists from the 1960s, who believed in the radical potential of building design. “When did we cease trying to progress through architecture?” she asks. “In his book ‘Last Futures’, Douglas Murphy suggests that we stopped looking outwards as soon as the virtual world emerged – cyberspace as opposed to outer space. For me, the current intangibility of image-making feeds into that idea.”
“Photography has historically always had this kind of slight separation from the rest of the art world”
Felicity Hammond. Stone Effect, from the Language of Living, 2016
Innovative instances of affordable and social housing seem few and far between in the UK, and this is precisely why Hammond’s work is so urgent. By deconstructing the values of commercial architecture and its assumed objectivity, she’s clearing a way for a dialogue about the way in which we live together. Moreover, her mixed media installations are also challenging the subordination of photography to traditional aesthetic forms. At House of Egorn, Hammond is showing her coalesced image-sculptures alongside fellow sculptors and painters – while at Amsterdam’s renowned photo-fair Unseen, she is producing new work through the annual ING commission within the framework of photography.
“Photography has historically always had this kind of slight separation from the rest of the art world,” she laughs. “You would never say to a painter ‘Oh, you’re not making paintings, that’s strange’. But as soon as photographers start working in other mediums, people question why you’re not using the camera. I feel like a constant fraud!” Does Hammond consider herself a photographer nonetheless? “My practice is still rooted in photography,” she concludes after some thought. “As long as I’m concerned with the impact of images and its environment, then I think I’m always going to be, I suppose, a photographer!”
Felicity Hammond,Restore to Factory Settings Press Print
“The Bullet Returns to Where the Shot was Fired”, a group exhibition featuring Felicity Hammond, Patrick Goddard, Mia Goyette and Hyojun Hyun, runs from 17 September to 22 October 2016 at the House of Egorn, Schöneberger Ufer 51, 10785 Berlin
Portrait Hana Knizova