Hammond’s method involves assembling a number of ideas, triggers and devices and launching freestyle into the picture plane – he talks about ‘just doing it’. His studio serves up an armoury of notations, prompts and templates that function paradoxically as both close friends and distancing devices. In the corner sits an old record player with its selection of music from Bach to Joy Division. One or two books attend the scene – observations on William Burroughs, writings by Robert Smithson, histories of the Anglo-Saxons.

The paintings themselves present a sensual field that is both intensely personal and distanced. The artist’s hand is present, but mediated through spray or template, and somehow denied. Arnulf Rainer talks about resolving his paintings physiognomically, and something similar is at work here. A number of the paintings appear to offer up faces but it is often impossible to convince oneself that they were meant. In fact, was any of it meant?

The presentation of the paintings further undermines the situation. Many of the works comprise a number of square panels that have obviously been re-arranged and rotated. Some are fixed but many are not. Are these things finished? ‘Where will it end?’, to quote JD.

MARCUS HAMMOND was born in 1964, and is the son of an architect. He studied fine art at Goldsmith’s College, London in the 1980s before burying himself in a number of big building projects that he sees now as extreme forms of displacement activity. Despite painting throughout his life he has exhibited only sporadically.

‘For me, painting is a selfish activity. I do it to keep equilibrium and to try to make the best painting that I can.‘ MH, 2010

Studio 3: first floor studio, 23 sqm, £160 pcm inc. power and heating.

Studio 4: first floor studio, 41 sqm, £170 pcm inc. power, water and heating. LET

Riverside Office: first floor office, river views on 3 sides, kitchen, toilet, £425 pcm inc. water and heating.

Susan Michie is concurrently showing at New Hall Art Collection, Murray Edwards College, Cambridge:

20 June – 17 July 2010

www.newhall.cam.ac.uk

A letter written in May to Susan Michie by the artist Simon Lewty provides some reflections on her current project

These new paintings have an ease that comes with age. Cartwright knows his territory pretty well by now. Every painting is a game of show and tell, or rather not quite show and not quite tell. What comes through the laps and lapses is the sense of a painter engaged with what it is to be here and how it goes.

Saturday and Sunday, 11-5pm. Part of West Lindsey Churches Festival. www.churchesfestival.com

‘I visited Bardsey Island off the western tip of the Llyn Peninsula of North Wales three years ago. This Island is known as the Island of 20,000 Saints (it is suggested that this is the number of saints buried there) and has been a place of pilgrimage for hundreds of years. I had no intention of my trip being a pilgrimage, however I did set out with a keen sense of curiosity and an open-ness to encounter this ‘liminal’ place. Ideas that specific topographic locations are regarded as threshold spaces where the barriers between heaven and earth are thin, enthral me. R.S. Thomas, a poet who knew the island very well, wrote: “tenses were out of place there”. It is not a matter of past or future. The present moment becomes a moment of eternity.

A.M. Allchin has written, “Places become holy on account of the people who have lived in them. Just as people are deeply influenced by the places where they live, places are shaped by the people who have dwelt there. There seems to be a mysterious interpenetration of person and place. Where lives have been lived constantly turned towards God, open to the expanses of eternity, open to receive the unexpected gifts of grace, there something of that openness remains. Others can enter into it.”