Lewis Hammond: “Music and sound enters the body. You feel it before you can diagnose it”

There’s a quiet theatre at play from the moment you step into The Perimeter, the 6a Architects-designed gallery in a quiet Bloomsbury mews. I am offered a choice of shoe coverings or custom-designed slippers for my feet so as not to scuff the delicate floors. The large windows are covered and the exhibition rooms are painted in moody colours: a midnight blue on the ground floor, a dark forest green above and a limewash-esque narcotic yellow downstairs that’s somehow both stylish fresco and The Yellow Wallpaper. The space hums with otherworldly sounds: this is ‘This Glass House’, the first public UK exhibition by Berlin-based British painter Lewis Hammond, accompanied by soundscapes created by electronic musician Actress.

Hammond calls and waves up from the first-floor stairwell. Immediately effusive yet serious, he shows me around each room. ‘This Glass House’ first showed at Kunstpalais in Erlangen, Germany and is shown at The Perimeter in a new iteration, with some new works. “I haven’t quite figured out how the constellation is working together, but I like that. It’s this known ambiguity, being generous with that openness with the viewer so they can interact with the works with their own experience,” he says.

We settle in the ground floor room to talk, and the choice to paint the walls such a dark blue becomes clearer the longer we spend there. The paintings exist between thrums of anxiety which aren’t directed at anything in particular, no specific thematic cause; the blue walls cocoon us, which is simultaneously comforting and discomfiting. Figures are caught in poses of extreme intimacy, most often in bed, alone or with others, unseeing and unaware. Literally so: their eyes are blank and without pupils, and smaller canvases are scattered over each floor with cascading disembodied eyes set against claret, deluging blue and yellow.

The figures are penned in by the edges of the canvas. One might imagine flailing limbs or clawing fingers just out of frame. Hammond’s work – in ‘This Glass House’ but also beyond –  speaks to a sense of anxiety and disjointedness that comes from existing in late capitalism. “To be alive today, there’s an inherent cognitive dissonance, for me at least. I look at the news and see what’s happening with Palestinians, then I’m meant to turn off my phone and go back to my daily life. It’s very difficult to occupy those two spaces without a sense of shame, guilt or political apathy,” Hammond explains. These feelings are pervasive within Hammond’s work; world events don’t just shut off because we want them to. They exist as spectres, hovering over us.

“It’s funny,” Hammond says, “a couple of years ago I was describing the figures in my work as having a sort of resilience and hopefulness within them. I’ve noticed a bit of a shift now, where there’s a despondency or an elevated sense of fatigue, or a sense of being bludgeoned into numbness that I’m seeing come through in them now  – this shifted for me as time’s gone on. I guess it mirrors the fractured nature of the world and my upheaval moving to Berlin.”

Originally from Wolverhampton, Hammond moved to Berlin during the pandemic after living in London for 13 years. This was never planned as a long-term move, and four years on, he admits to feeling the pull back to London all the time. When he was younger, he was more involved in direct activism and action. “Something that pulls me back to England is that I feel more fluent in the politics of the country and I could probably make more of an impact than I feel I do in Berlin,” he says. “I’m protected because I’m not so embedded in the culture. I didn’t grow up there so naturally there’s this gap.”

Our conversation is accompanied by the thrum of Actress’ sound work for this show, which undulates in tone from ominous drawn-out vinyl scratches to choral field recordings. The two are cousins and have been wanting to collaborate professionally for years. This isn’t the first time Hammond has soundtracked his shows with electronic music. When he won the Ars Viva Prize in 2022, he invited experimental electronic artist Laurel Halo to play at his opening at the Brücke Museum.

“When you interact with images you look and try to decipher or understand, whereas music and sound enters the body. You can’t stop it and you feel it before you can even diagnose or understand what it is.” The work is working on you before you’re aware of it. The process for creating the soundscape for ‘This Glass House’ mirrors the collage technique Hammond uses to create his paintings, even featuring a recording that Hammond made in New York in 2015 of a choir singing in a church.

Similarly, his collaged process draws together disparate references—photos of old friends, found objects, Giotto’s frescoes at the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua—with a refracting effect, something familiar, recognisable but also not. Walking around The Perimeter, a joyous painting depicting a parent grappling with their squirming toddler sits alongside one of a person caught in a moment of tense, presumably sexual, ecstasy, their mouth wide open, sucking or exclaiming. The paintings are often so obscure, with unidentifiable light sources (no suns or blazing lightbulbs here), that it forces you to lean in, squint and engage with them physically, so their feelings are now your feelings, their discomfort or ecstasy now yours.

As we say goodbye, I’m left to wander around the gallery again. In the world Lewis Hammond creates in his paintings, there are no pinning colours to any sort of mast; ambiguity reigns in a way that acknowledges nuances and grey areas. It’s a potentially uncomfortable world, one that forces the viewer to reckon with parts of themselves that they’d rather not examine.