Print (MA)
Lydia Hamblet
Lydia Hamblet (b.1995) is a London based artist whose work is concerned with the everyday and universal experience of the weather. Her work takes the form of installations, public interventions and large scale prints for both public spaces and galleries.
Hamblet received her BA in Illustration from Camberwell College of Arts, London in 2017 and later undertook the Topolski Studio Reportage Residency. She is a recipient of the Print Makers Appeal Fund and was previously shortlisted for the Clyde & Co Art Award.
Everyone has something to say about the weather. It’s something we encounter, it washes over us, and it sticks with us — the weather is key to universal experience.
This practice reflects on shared encounters, spaces and environments, drawing upon personal narratives around the weather. The work oscillates between abstraction and representation. Influenced by Husserl’s phenomenology, whereby experience occurs without prior knowledge or preconception, it questions spectatorship, hierarchy and what it means to be a viewer in a space. Acts of intervention, such as the removal and replacement of advertising, disrupt existing social and visual hierarchies imposed by the commercial monopoly of public space.
Throughout the work, everyday thoughts relating to the weather are posed as questions, sometimes directly to the viewer or spectator. Recent work, focussed on encounters in local sports pitches, further questions this role of spectator through the physical and personal experience of confronting the movement and energy in the landscape.
Drawing is central to the work and is often where the initial research and development happens. Once finally translated through a process of mono-screenprinting, the work contemplates the reliability of memory in relation to the encounter. This openness to translation allows decisions of colour and gesture to be resolved in the process, leading to evocative and atmospheric works on paper.
AWP (Tennis)
Detail
Detail
Detail
An urgency of mark-making reflects the physical disturbance in the space, for instance the red square in the centre of the paper. This highlights a continued fascination with movement and energy in the landscape, and the ways it is influenced by the weather.
Medium:
Unique Screenprint on PaperSize:
403 x 136 cm
AWP (Tennis): ii
AWP (Tennis): ii
Detail
Detail
Initially developed in response to the closure of the sports pitches due to Covid-19, this work seeks to reflect on the absence of energy within these cordoned off spaces. Now the tennis courts have reopened, the work is presented alongside the council’s banners explaining social distancing rules.
Medium:
PVCSize:
215 x 73 cm
Oval Station
Kennington Park / Post Office
Bus Stop Closed
Kennington Lane
Kennington Rd / Imperial War Museum (A)
Kennington Rd / Imperial War Museum (B)
Waterson Street
St. Thomas's Square
King Edward's Road
Shoreditch Church
This series investigates notions of ‘non-place’ in relation to public encounters. A term coined by Marc Auge, a non-place is a space of transience, where we remain anonymous — there is not enough significance for it to be regarded as a place.
The work is made while reflecting on personal narratives and memories around the weather, but not with the specific location of the bus stops in mind. The work exists on its own, the site is occupied by the work. An intervention in the visual landscape, known as ‘subvertising’ disrupts our habitual ways of thinking.
