The River Entered My Home by Hammonds + West
Artist Hollis Hammonds and poet Sasha West form the collaborative team Hammonds + West, whose works explore themes surrounding climate change and environmental degradation through multi-modal artworks.
Their work engages in what Timothy Morton calls “grief work,” articulating the experience of living in the midst of a fragile, changing ecosystem. Through self interrogations, the artists question both individual and societal contributions to environmental crisis. Viewers dwell in wreckage, suspended between flood and fire, stasis and loss.
Hammonds’ drawings reflect the melancholy and darkness manifest in West’s poems, asking us to reexamine the impact of elements when those elements are fed by human actions. Hammonds often draws inspiration from a fire that consumed her childhood home in Independence, Kentucky, when she was 15 years old. In the context of climate change, that displacement takes on new meaning. Rather than being an aberration of the past, the incident foretells a potentially apocalyptic future.
West’s poems connect to the landscapes of ruin in Hammonds’ drawing, questioning our culture’s belief in limitless growth. Collapsing time, her speakers range across eras and historical events to try and articulate their role as witnesses in the first generation to feel palpably the effects of climate change (mere decades after global warming was first named). Her speakers work to name the complex spaces of responsibility and despair, understanding both to be necessary for hope and action.
As a collaborative team Hammonds + West create works which interweave both image and text. Their work opens liminal spaces where hard boundaries dissolve: past disasters forecast future ones, the cracking of earth becomes the wreckage in water, what is civilization becomes wilderness. Hammonds + West invite viewers to see anew their own daily part in making the physical world and, thus, the future of landscapes.
About the artist
Hollis Hammonds is a multimedia artist whose work, built on memory and utilizing evidence from the public collective consciousness, investigates social issues ranging from environmental degradation to human-made disasters. Her drawings and multimedia installations have been widely exhibited throughout the US, including solo exhibitions at venues such as The Grace Museum in Abilene, TX, Women & Their Work in Austin, TX, and Redux Contemporary Art Center in Charleston, SC. Hollis Hammonds is the author of Drawing Structure: Conceptual and Observational Techniques and has had her creative work featured in New American Paintings, Manifest’s International Drawing Annual, FOA, Uppercase Magazine, LandEscape Art Review, and Art on Paper. She is an Associate Professor of Art & Design at Texas A&M University in the College of Performance, Visualization, and Fine Arts.
Sasha West is a poet and associate professor of creative writing at St. Edward’s University, where she founded and coordinates the Environmental Humanities minor. Her first book of poems, Failure and I Bury the Body (Harper Perennial), was a winner of the National Poetry Series, the Texas Institute of Letters Bob Bush First Book of Poetry Award, and a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Fellowship. Recent poems and reviews have appeared in American Poetry Review, Ecotone, Agni, Georgia Review, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, and the anthology The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood. Her newest book, How to Abandon Ship, was released from Four Way Books in March 2024 and featured on The Slowdown podcast.