'Andrzej's Cabin' - A signed limited edition woodcut print by Tom Hammick made especially for the NHS 70th Anniversary Portfolio. Reduction woodcut, edition variable on Saunders Waterford HP 100% cotton...
'Andrzej's Cabin' - A signed limited edition woodcut print by Tom Hammick made especially for the NHS 70th Anniversary Portfolio. Reduction woodcut, edition variable on Saunders Waterford HP 100% cotton 356 g/m (260 lb). Published by Imperial Health Charity.
"In the late 60's and 70's, where I lived in the country outside London as a boy there were two characters who lived off grid, in a handmade shed and an old driver's wagon. It was, as I saw it, a romantic life on the fringe that I craved for myself, and still do. These 'outcasts', living on the edge of society, have mostly disappeared from life as a computerisation and the digitalisation of our day to day existence has meant that to gain access to the benefits of a universal Health System and the safety net of the most basic social benefits, we have all some extent lost much of our personal privacy - the very things these loners were hiding from in the first place.
As an antidote to the loss of the kind of Johnny 'Rooster' Byron characters I remember living alongside, (that Jez Butterworth celebrated in his brilliant play Jerusalem) I wanted to make an image of someone living, like Henry David Thoreau, in a shack out in the wilderness, as a form of escape from our caged-in, sterilised neon worlds. I thought such an image of romanticised shack-life, might in some way, conjure patients and hospital staff to hear the birds sing, watch the sun go down and the stars come out, and get back to a feeling of wonder conjured up by the natural world." - Tom Hammick