Since graduating from my MFA in Fine Art Sculpture at The Slade (UCL) in 2023, I have
been working I have gradually been gaining more opportunities to show my work both within the UK and abroad, and have also been working multiple jobs to support myself and trying to make things work. The support of The Dover Prize would provide me with the financial stability to enable more focussed studio time and to enable to take seriously the further development of my studio practice. It would also provide the confidence boost and professional credibility to approach other partners to enable the critical curatorial support and guidance to reach the next stage of my career as an artist.
For the past few years, I have been utilizing a poetic engagement with materials, song, and text to explore relationships to craft, manufacturing and industrial heritage, often within the context of the North of England. Much of this work has been done thinking around the collections of smaller regional museums, and how they can be used to unlock local history. I would be particularly excited to further develop this in the context of Darlington and the wider County Durham and Teeside regions’ local museums, such as Hopetown, and would love to work with local collections and archives as a means to explore the industrial heritage of the area.
I am hoping that the £10,000 bursary would enable me to carry out a period of focussed material and conceptual research, and to develop an ambitious new body of work that could be shown both in Darlington, and pitched to partner institutions in other regions of the UK. I would be especially excited to develop a new body of work in the context of the North East of England, an area that I love and have learned so much from as an during my undergraduate studies, and subsequently as a practicing artist.
I have a strong connection to the North East of England, having previously lived and worked in Newcastle for 6 years between 2014 and 2020. I graduated from the BA Fine Art programme at Newcastle University in 2018 and have been involved in artist-led activity in the region both as a student, and as a practicing artist since graduating, curating, collaborating, and showing work with organisations such as: Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival, The Newbridge Project, Cheeseburn Arts, Gallery 36, and Slugtown.
I would be excited to return to work with communities in the North East through the support of the Dover Prize, and would specifically like to investigate the history of Darlington’s connection as a hub of development in the building the railways within the UK. As an artist, I have previously developed projects exploring the industrial and manufacturing heritage of areas of Northern England and rural Norway. I have worked in conversation with representatives of local communities to develop research on these projects. I would love the opportunity to further develop this strand of my practice in connection to this nationally important heritage in relation to Darlington and it’s surrounding communities.
I am a visual artist originally from Macclesfield (Northwest England), currently based in East London. My art practice is primarily rooted in sculptural practice, and extends to other manners of spatial expression through moving image, music, and performance. I am interested in objects, images, and contexts that might feel out of sync with their environments, and those whose intended values or functions I may be able to unpick or question. Many works reference a poetic engagement with notions of landscape, and the complexities of human interactions and industry within their surrounding locations.
Much of my work engaged with notions of archiving, often in relation to Hito Steyerl’s ‘In defense of the poor image’ in that the aesthetic qualities of the perceived ‘poorness’ of an object or image become inherent to its way of conveying meaning, and Shumon Basar’s notion of Chaos-core, in which he describes as articulation of the present as consisting of objects ‘unmoored from their provenance’. I often work remaking or rethinking objects or material I encounter whose information is in some way incomplete, and within whose gaps I might make speculative interventions. I am particularly interested in histories of craft and labour, and how a poetic engagement with materiality can be used as a tool to allegorically examine a range of socio-political anxieties. I have recently spent one month on a fully-funded residency in rural Norway, where I have been researching local musical traditions, meeting and learning from members of the area’s local communities. The research conducted during this residency is now developing into a larger project which will recompose partially documented portions of song and dance, alongside playable reworkings of broken folk-instruments held within the homes of local people. The project will culminate in a site-specific installation of video, music, and objects this coming November. Previously, my work has been exhibited and performed at venues such as: Victoria Miro and Cubitt (London), The Newbridge Project (Newcastle), G39 (Cardiff), and Berwick Film and Media Festival (Northumberland). My work is held in both private and public collections in the UK.
MFA Fine Art (Sculpture), The Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, 2020-23
BA (Hons) Fine Art, Newcastle University, 2014-18
Betty Malcolm Prize, The Slade School of Fine Art (2023)
Sarabande Scholarship, Sarabande Foundation & The Slade School of Fine Art (2020)
CGP Open Best in Show, CGP Gallery, London (2018)
Bartlett Travel Scholarship, Dubai, UAE (2017)
Bartlett Travel Scholarship, Bardenas Reales Desert, Spain (2016)
Åfjord Art Month, Norway (2025)
NGCA, Sunderland (2019)
Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival (2018)
My collaborative video/ performance work is held in the collection of the NGCA, Sunderland
Åfjord Art Month Residency, Norway (2025)
Blackhorse Workshop Artist Residency (2024)
Email: jamiehammill94@gmail.com
Address: 76a Morley Road, London, London, E106LL, GB
Local Authority: Waltham Forest
