Fine Art - Harmony Hammond: Making as resistance, abstraction as survival
- Lisa Smith
- Jan 31
- 2 min read
Week 4 of A Year with Queer Women’s Art, Film, and Music
Harmony Hammond has spent her career doing something deceptively simple: making work anyway. Long before queer art was welcomed by institutions—or even named safely—Hammond was building a visual language rooted in feminism, materiality, and refusal. Her work doesn’t announce itself loudly, but it doesn’t yield either.
Hammond emerged from the feminist art movement of the 1970s, but her practice quickly moved beyond categorization. Paintings, wrapped fabric, sculptural forms—often rough, tactile, and deliberately unresolved—became sites where identity could exist without being illustrated. This is not representational work. It doesn’t depict queerness so much as hold space for it.
Material matters deeply here. Fabric, canvas, paint, rope—these are historically feminized materials, often dismissed as domestic or secondary. Hammond reclaims them without apology. Wrapped forms suggest protection and constraint at the same time. Thick surfaces feel worked over, laboured, lived with. You’re aware of the body that made them, even when no body is shown.
That absence is important. Hammond’s work resists legibility. There are no figures to read, no narratives to decode. Instead, there’s an insistence on presence without explanation. This is abstraction not as aesthetic choice, but as strategy. When visibility is dangerous or unavailable, abstraction becomes a way to exist anyway.
For queer viewers, especially those familiar with earlier generations of feminist and lesbian artists, Hammond’s work can feel like infrastructure. Not flashy, not loud—foundational. It’s the kind of art that makes later work possible by proving that space can be taken, slowly and persistently, even when recognition lags behind.
Her influence extends beyond the studio. Hammond has been a writer, curator, and organizer, deeply involved in building feminist and queer art communities. That commitment—to making room for others while continuing her own practice—runs parallel to the work itself. Making, here, is collective as much as individual.
As the Week 4 artist, Harmony Hammond closes the month in a way that feels earned. After lineage, interiority, visibility, and defiance, her work reminds us that resistance doesn’t always look dramatic. Sometimes it looks like showing up to the studio again. Sometimes it looks like choosing materials that have been undervalued and insisting they matter. Sometimes it looks like refusing to explain yourself to an audience that hasn’t yet learned how to look.
Hammond’s work doesn’t rush you. It asks for patience. It asks you to trust that meaning can exist without being spelled out. In doing so, it offers a quiet but powerful lesson: survival can be a practice, and making can be a form of staying.
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