painter, pastellist and sketcher, was born in Spearwood (WA), the only daughter of four children. Her Yugoslavian parents wanted her to be a dressmaker, but after an art teacher at Fremantle Tech. recognised her talent she was allowed to attend art classes one day a week alongside a full-time dressmaking course. She left home and took a dressmaking job in Perth then became assistant seamstress at a boarding school for boys, living in and attending drawing classes at the Perth Technical College at night. She went to Melbourne in 1950 to study at the National Gallery School when William Dargie was Head. Needing to support herself, she worked part-time with the State Rivers and Water Supply Commission while continuing at the Gallery School for two full days and four nights a week. The immense poverty in the inner suburbs led her to move politically to the Left and she joined the Eureka Youth League, the junior branch of the Communist Party. Hammond married in 1955 then spent a year full time as a gallery student. She became pregnant in 1956 and finally had four children. All were raised in the 1950s in inner city Melbourne, which she continued to draw whenever she had the chance. Her oeuvre includes lots of witty images of women with shopping bags and kids, doing the washing, etc. Her beat was Richmond and Northcote, although she also had studios in Fairfield and later near the Victoria Market in the city.

Despite missing 'a year or two because of babies’, Hammond has exhibited almost every year since her gallery days, initially with the social realist group – Vic O’Connor, Ailsa O’Connor , Jim Wigley, Bernard Rust, Hymie Slade and Noel Counihan – then regularly with a peace group she started with Ailsa O’Connor, showing work at the Trades Hall Gallery. She has also exhibited as a member of the Women’s Art Forum and at the Springfield Art Show. Although her work has always sold, she nevertheless survived financially until 1985 by teaching at RMIT. The Age of 24 August 1992, 15, reports Hammond as saying:

I am not interested in painting decorative pictures. I always want to say something…[but] I don’t think many people take much notice of artists now, they don’t want us to say anything. Art is not supposed to have a clear message now, but to be obscure and clever.

She called her 1992 works 'recession paintings’ that 'reflect the times. I wonder what would happen if I went across the river and painted shoppers in Toorak or South Yarra.’ She sits and sketches street life from her car: 'I am much too inhibited to sketch in the street’. Bridget McDonnell Gallery, Melbourne, has exhibited her work for decades, including a solo exhibition of oil paintings in August-September 2002.

Writers:

Staff Writer

Date written:

1996

Last updated:

2007