D  e  s  e  r  t     E  x  p  o  s  u  r  e     March 2005

Poetry in Motion

Deming painter, mixed-media artist and bookbinder Feehan Hammock combines words and images to create intensely personal visions.

By Marjorie Lilly

Feehan Hammock has lived in Deming since 1981, unobtrusively producing her very personal brand of art.

Since they married a few years ago, she's lived with artist husband Glenn Hammock in a remodeled Quonset hut in the wide-open spaces south of town. Her large cluttered studio, or workshop, is in one half of the hut, while her husband's is in a building nearer town.

Seeing in a Sacred Manner by Deming artist Feehan Hammock

She makes paintings—both watercolor and mixed media—along with several types of prints, note cards and books that are themselves works of art like her paintings and that she binds herself. She has also produced ingenious little objects like what she calls a "mystery box" that opens various ways, and a book in the form of the children's "Jacob's ladder" toy that folds and unfolds with alternating lines of a haiku poem inside. She's made whimsical books for her four grandchildren with tiny stuffed animals attached.

The Purple Cow, a gift shop on Iron Street in Deming, has just recently started selling some of her note cards and leather blank books. Her paintings have sold for as much as $1,600.

Hammock's mixed-media works are currently being displayed at the Nash Gallery in Las Cruces. Her watercolors are at Studio W in Ruidoso. Some of her works have been bought by the Mimbres Valley Learning Center in Deming.

You might think she'd feel isolated as an artist living in Deming. But she says, "No, I like having a quiet time. If I want to be with artists, I do that. I go to the city and talk to friends." She works most of the time, as much as 20 hours a day (on one occasion) if she gets caught up in an idea.

Hammock has traveled all over the US and Canada to teach her art—in Las Cruces, Boston, Vancouver, British Columbia and Texas, to name a few places.

For a few years, too, she had an office on East Spruce Street in Deming called the Institute for Creative Arts. "Kids came there, it had summer programs, and there were programs in the schools," she says. "It was a place to learn, produce and display art."

In Bucks County, Pa., where she grew up, she got in the habit of making things. She made clothing, stuffed animals, and knitted things "like my grandmother and mother did." Her maiden name was Sam Feehan, but she has taken the name Feehan Hammock to sign her artwork.

Histotechnology, which involves the study of human tissues, was her first area of study after high school. "It was very 'bread and butter,'" she says. "I had children to raise." She got involved in art later, first as a potter and then branching out into the many art forms she now creates.

The art of bookbinding she learned on her own, although she has taken courses in calligraphy and painting. Another area of study was neurolinguistics, in a program in California with motivational speaker Tony Robbins. "I'm very interested in the way mind and body interact," she says. "I did it so I could communicate with children I was working with better."

Her study helped her tune in to the learning style of her students. "Everybody learns from a different modality," she says. "There are visual learners, auditory learners, kinesthetic learners."

Hammock does series of works, either paintings or books, on a theme she wants to explore. Her most recent series has been based on the petroglyphs and pictographs she's seen in the Southwest, including Deming's Florida Mountains. "Pictographs are painted," she explains, "and petroglyphs are chipped."

She had a one-man show with this subject at the Tombaugh Gallery in Las Cruces in February last year, called "Timeless Souls." "There is that singular draw at these sites, like waking near a vortex and being drawn to the center," she wrote in that exhibit's flyer. "Hiking throughout New Mexico, Arizona and Utah to pictograph and petroglyph sites, this draw has never been stronger."

The figures in this series are drawn from pictographs in Utah, which she and her husband walked for four hours into a place called Horseshoe Canyon to visit. "They're vibrations of the existence of whoever has been before," she says. "To me they're spirits—spirits left behind." Her three-dimensional renderings of the pictographs help bring these beings back to life.

Other ideas she has developed in her art series are "Journeys," "Time" and the "Luna" series focusing on the moon. "As time is a 'layering' of life experiences," she writes, "so the process involved in each of these works comes from many layers of color, text, symbol."

Hammock's mixed-media pieces almost always start with an image or a quote, she says. "Sometimes I might have six or seven pieces of paper on the ground and take a big sumi brush and make marks," she says. "Then I'll take the one that appeals to me, and make a piece from that."

In the background of her "Time" paintings she has lettering going forwards and backwards in alternating lines, in a style known as "boustrophedon." She quotes from poet Pablo Neruda's "Oda al Tiempo," and uses images from an old manual called Clock-Cleaning and Repairing.

In her paintings there may be washes of color, more images or words, or gesso with marks carved or incised in it to create a texture. "I don't just have one layer on top of another. In-between I put a clean coat of a matte medium or a clear acrylic." The many layers of different mediums "gives it more depth," she says.

Sometimes her paintings are made mostly with ink. Hammock likes sumi ink (a black carbon-based ink used in Japan and China), walnut ink for mellow brown tones, and gold ink (made from gold leaf), ordinary gouache and stick ink for lettering. She uses metal nibs, brush, reeds and quills for the calligraphy in her mixed-media pieces.

Characteristically in her works, there's an interplay between calligraphic elements and abstraction, so there's an effect of letters talking to shapes. Writers she quotes range from the classic Dante, Tennyson, Lorca and Neruda, to Maryanne Williamson, who wrote the bestselling spiritual guide Return to Love. She may use phrases from "unknown" poets like Kim Ly Bul-Burton or that she's written herself in notebooks she keeps.

Last year she did not produce very much because she spent several months in Pennsylvania with her father before he died. But she says she made "two new content books, some blank leather journals, and some paintings at the beginning of the year." She 's now at work on a raven series and a goat series. She's also finishing up an illuminated calligraphic manuscript of a 1902 book called Don'ts for Girls, which her mother owned. It contains such quaint, sage advice as, "Don't be ashamed of your parents. They may be unlearned and dull, but they gave you the chance to become what you are." She hopes to have it published in a limited edition.

Hammock's shows and collections include the Philadelphia Public Library, the Branigan Museum in Las Cruces, the San Francisco Library in the "Words for Peace Collaborative," and Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia.

Her works have been published in the international Somerset Studio Magazine (for paper arts) and in Escribiente (a magazine of a guild for calligraphers in Albuquerque). A Web site for her and her husband's art is at www.zianet.com/feehamm.

Marjorie Lilly, who lives in Deming, writes the occasional Borderlines column for Desert Exposure.

Back to top of page.