Fast is fine but accuracy is final

About

Project Ability is pleased to present ‘Fast is fine but accuracy is final’ a two-person exhibition of paintings by Glasgow-based artist Charlie Hammond alongside new works byProject Ability Aspire artist Tommy Mason. 

The uncommon pairing of these two artists looks to question the dichotomy between art that is made in supportive settings as being a pure, authentic activity and that which is made with a heightened awareness of a viewing public and weighted by a legacy of art history and theory.

The exhibition considers various aspects of art production, from the conditions of play in studio practice, to the different settings and contexts of making. By finding common ground and parallels within both artists’ approaches, the aim is to contribute to the debate around the criteria and terminology of  ‘Outsider Art’.

The title for this exhibition returns to the original site of much of Tommy Mason’s imagery – the American Old West – and is a quote attributed to Wild West lawman Wyatt Earp. This relationship to the speed of execution is true in both artists work, whilst their rudimentary figuration has an accuracy of its own.

Charlie Hammond lives and works in Glasgow. He graduated from GSA painting department in 2002. He has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally. In recent work Hammond has considered notions of labour from the domestic every day in relation to the idea of art practice as toil. His recent paintings have featured washing machines, laundry baskets, brooms, wheels and other banal symbols associated with odd jobs. These symbols are further united by notions of strife through a themed series of sweat paintings; denigrating the act of painting as equivalent to cyclical daily activities of making a mess and cleaning it up. Through playful mark making, repetition, varying methods of application and sculptural collage, he treats his paintings as expanded vehicles for instinctive physical and visual interventions.

Tommy Mason is an artist from Project Ability’s Aspire programme for people with learning disabilities, where he has been attending for 25 years. Mason speedily creates collections of drawings of men, faces, horses, trees, and other immaterial abstract shapes stemming from his interest in Western films depicting the American Frontier. When seen collectively, these modest, untitled works on paper, executed in whatever materials he has to hand, help to form this enigmatic practice from obscure pursuit to a lyrical sense of sorts.