Harmony Hammond, Hug, 1978

Harmony Hammond: Hi, this is Harmony Hammond, and I'm speaking to you by telephone from Galisteo, New Mexico, where I live and work. 

For Hug, I wrapped strips and pieces of fabrics gathered from different sources, some from the domestic environment, and some from streets in the Lower Manhattan garment district. I wrapped them around ladder shaped armatures made of wood. Sometimes, I used old broken wooden ladders I'd found, and other times I made my own. The resulting organic abstract forms allowed me to escape figuration, but presence the body. Ladders always suggest the bodies that use them. 

It was conceptually important to me that the ladder forms were not hollow or stuffed, but rather, like women's lives, made out of themselves from the inside out—with the inside showing on the outside. The wood armature functions as a skeleton, the layers of wrapped fabric as muscle and tissue, and the acrylic paint as skin.

It is kind of parallel to the early movement phrase, "The personal is political." Starting with the center, starting with the core, and moving out from the center. And probably it’s related to my martial arts practice also at the time. I was studying at that time the martial arts, T'ai chi ch'üan, but also the Japanese martial art, Aikido, in which case you are centered, and the movements are in circles out from the center. So, it's kind of all connected.