Last year English National Opera appointed its first artist-in-residence — the painter and printmaker Tom Hammick. Anyone who sees his new show at Flowers Gallery, London, Wall, Window, World will quickly understand why.
Hammick’s boldly coloured images have a theatrical quality. They conjure an eerie world-within-a-world atmosphere, infusing their subject matter, however apparently simple, with a sense of meaning, of prescience, of symbolic mystery. They offer a glimpse of a realm beyond the everyday. In many ways, this is precisely the vision an operatic production can also reveal. Amid a carnivalesque medley of music and set design, lighting and costume, a transcendent world is conjured.
Opera offers what can feel like “an out of body experience” says Hammick. Certainly, he says, his year at ENO