Mary Hambleton and her “Hard Rain” exhibit
Most of Mary Hambleton’s late work at the exibit seemed to have been created through a very therapeutic process. Although most of her “cancer-specific” work included the image of her PET scan and perhaps a dodo bird or two (or three), Mary also used the ambiguity of color and shape and natural inspirations that continued the themes of her earlier work while battling cancer.
Her colorful - and in my opinion more abstract – works were almost oozing with emotion and careful thought. The ways Mary scraped away parts of her paint, added shapes on top of each other, and adhered 3-D objects around the wood block or canvas impressed upon me that art served the same effect for Mary as does journaling for others. Tiffany Bell mentions that Mary took time to create her works and had begun crafting Quech (my favorite) and Query long before she confronted cancer. Although she began these works before her relationship with cancer began, Mary finished and titled them between 2002-2004, and so they have been included as part of this exhibit. I liked how the curator included these works because it represents a link between Mary’s past and present life in the context of her cancer timeline. The pattern of her work demonstrated that color and natural shapes were very important to her, and her abstract style held great potential for serving as an outlet for human thought – both her own and her viewers.
On the other hand, the PET scan-esque pieces that were contained within game boards of extinct animals (over and over again), or by themselves were not my favorite. Of course, I realize that she must have been very contemplative about her life and the possibility of death — which no doubt led her to consider her own demise against the demise of other species. There was something very uncanny about seeing an x-ray-type image of a human, which serves the specific purpose of clarifying the agent of death: cancer. I can only imagine that Mary was mystified by the deep symbolism her scan represented and saw it as the potential to remind her viewers of the reality of death as part of the circle of life. At the same time, caner did not become the soul focus of her work, as Tiffany Bell’s article attests to. Even while knowing of Mary’s story, most of her work encourages the viewer to create her own interpretations out of the ambiguity of color, shape, pain, and humanity evident in her works.
Like Yu mentioned in class, I would have liked to see more of her work before her diagnosis – just out of curiosity. Bell mentions how Hambleton wanted to “endow her work with spiritual or mystical content.” In reading the article about Mary, I get the feeling that her projects aroused affects similar to those of “Hard Rain” even before her cancer-imbued work began. Bell also mentions Mary’s fondness of incorporating natural materials into her work, as well as creating nature-inspired images and forms. The ambiguity inherent to her pieces correspond to the mystic reality of nature when one takes the time to consider it closely.
In terms of nature, art, and technology, I witnessed yet another perspective of this topic in Mary Hambleton on Tuesday. She incorporates the shapes and contemplations of nature/humanity into either canvassed wood blocks or digitalized, abstracted compilations of her own PET scans. Mary allows us to consider the picture of our own mortality that would not exist if it were not for technology. She also encourages her viewer to find the piece beneath the technology, which exists in the careful thought that composes her art.