In these five pieces Valerie Hammond explores the mysteries surrounding Emily Dickinson’s life and the self-imposed isolation that informed her creative processes. Hammond immersed herself in Dickinson’s letters, poems and herbarium pages, conjuring her form and memory in Séance and Traveler. She introduces images of dead birds, moths, leaves — all found in Dickinson’s writing to create gestural movements that are preserved in these works on paper with a coating of wax. Hammond was struck by a visitor’s description of the poet as a “hurrying whiteness that vanished like a ghost”; her form is barely present, concealed behind a door or a window, yet communicating all the same. The fleeting form is the basis for the shadow-like figures that hang in the corner of the room. These are created with a pioneering digital laser-cutting technique that cut phrases from Dickinson’s poems out of paper and Plexiglas.

Valerie Hammond uses encaustic and printmaking processes to create layered images that trace a subject’s spirit. Her most recent solo exhibition at Cue Art Foundation, New York, NY explored the emotional, physical and psychological properties of portraiture through works on paper that focused on the heads and hands of her close friends. She has also exhibited at MPercent Gallery, Cleveland, IL; Lisa Sette Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ; Samuel Dorsky Museum, New Paltz, NY; International Print Center, New York, NY; Port Gallery Port Chalmers, New Zealand; Michele Soskine Inc., Madrid, Spain; and Indira Ghandi Center for the Arts, New Delhi, India. She has participated as a teaching artist for Studio in a School for many years and teaches printmaking at Columbia University. She earned her BA from University of California Santa Barbara, and her MFA from University of California Berkeley.