Artist, Harmony Hammond: Hi, I am Harmony Hammond and I’m talking to you from Santa Fe, New Mexico where I live and work.
I did my etching Forms of Desire at the Printmaking Workshop in New York, which I learned about from Bob Blackburn. His attitude was like, “You wanna make a print? Come and work here!” And that set the tone of this communal workspace.
Forms of Desire presents two female characters that populated my work at the time. They were kind of outrageous. They could just strut around, do whatever they wanted. Floating on this field of misty blue sky-water, there is Ruffled Waters on the left—a dancing, abstract, open fan form. And on the right is a pinkish, fleshy vaginal shape. There is a line that goes from one to the other and yet they occupy their own space.
I think of them as bodies, not figures. Bodies are social-political sites that act and are acted upon. I am usually talking about gendered bodies, queered bodies, bodies that have been disenfranchised or don’t have voices. How do I give them agency? With abstraction and queer abstraction, what I like about both of them is that they’re indeterminate. They’re not fixed. And that’s the space I just move in. It's just where I linger.