The Great Turning: We Gather, We Grow, We Tend
In this exhibition, Hammonds + West explore the transformative potential of art within our fragile ecosystem. By integrating visual art and poetry, we offer a hopeful perspective on navigating and reshaping environmental challenges. The work invites viewers to engage in a reflective and empowering space where boundaries between past and future, loss and renewal, are reimagined. The exhibition will include drawings, sculptures, installations, sound, and text.
Artists: 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 exhibits and public engagements. Their multi-media installations have been exhibited at galleries including Beeler Gallery Columbus College of Art & Design, Wright Gallery Texas A & M University, Central gallery of the Austin Public Library, and at ArtPrize 2023. Both artists live and work in Austin, TX.
Hammonds’ evocative drawings and West’s poignant poetry come together to challenge and inspire. Through her reflections on a childhood fire, Hammonds connects personal loss to the broader context of climate change, while West’s poems traverse historical and contemporary landscapes, offering a vision of resilience and action. Together the artists’ work highlights the possibility of growth and regeneration even amidst uncertainty.
Hammonds + West blend images, text, and multimedia to create immersive experiences that illuminate the potential for a sustainable future. The Great Turning encourages viewers to see their role in nurturing this future, fostering a sense of unity and shared purpose. The art aspires to inspire collective action and hope, guiding us all toward a more resilient and harmonious world.
Hollis Hammonds is a multimedia artist whose work, built on memory and utilizing evidence from the public collective consciousness, investigates social issues ranging from economic disparity and state violence to environmental degradation and human-made disasters. Her dystopian drawings and found-object installations have been widely exhibited throughout the US, including solo exhibitions at venues such as Women & Their Work in Austin, TX, Redux Contemporary Art Center in Charleston, SC, Dishman Art Museum in Beaumont, TX, and the Reed Gallery in Cincinnati, OH. Hammonds has been an artist-in-residence at McColl Center for Art + Innovation, the Ucross Foundation, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. She is currently a professor of art at St. Edward’s University.
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. Herfirst 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.
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