Harmony Hammond

A painting like Farm Ghosts: The Wife's Tale specifically refers to the farmer's wife, to the chores and responsibilities women have running farms, endlessly working both indoors and out. It's about the weathered materials of the domestic environment situated within the larger rural landscape, the interior spaces as well as the exterior spaces. So you have the windmill, guarding the land abandoned because of hard times, drought, and capitalism, abandoned because of foul weather and foul play (banking and international farming concerns). The windmill is dysfunctional. The water troughs are empty. There is no water, growth, or life. The floor linoleum and pressed ceiling tin literally create an interior space, suggesting additional sites of violence or domestic struggles. So the piece is very layered. This is not a nostalgic view of farm life. What actually went on here? We do not know. Narratives of struggles to survive are suggested through the materials, the objects, the paint, and the words.

Burden continues metaphors of land and the gendered body as sites of exploitation. The horse collar refers to workhorses, or beasts of burden, sexuality, reproduction, women as a labor force, and, of course, to labor itself. The straw is also hair, perhaps wet or bloody hair. The title Burden refers to the burden of representation that women artists always deal with, the cultural weight under which we always work and the necessity of speaking as a gendered subject.

Copyright Frontiers Publishing, Inc. 1997
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved