Cynthia Hammond
Dr Cynthia Hammond (b. 1969) is an artist and historian of the built environment. In 2002 she was the first student to graduate with a research-creation project in the Humanities Interdisciplinary PhD Program at Concordia University, Montréal. In her dissertation, Hammond argued that art-making is both a form of knowledge, a method of inquiry, and a powerful means to mobilize communities around shared pasts and collective heritage, particularly architecture. Her dissertation won the Governor-General's Gold Medal and was later published as Architects, Angels, Activists and the City of Bath, 1765-1965 (Ashgate 2012, Routledge 2017). From 2003-05, Hammond held the first SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship at the School of Architecture, McGill University, where she produced an award-winning essay on the role of British nursing reformer, Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) in hospital design and British imperial interests.
Hammond is full Professor in Concordia’s Department of Art History, where she teaches the history of the built environment as well as courses on feminist and spatial theory, interdisciplinary practice/research-creation, and oral history. Hammond has directed two federally-funded oral history research-creation projects about the built environment: "La ville extraordinaire", which geolocates the stories of over 200 Montrealers on an interactive platform (https://rs-atlascine.concordia.ca/la-ville-extraordinaire/index.html) and "The Spaces of Restorative and Transitional Justice", which uses oral history and spatial analysis to explore the spatial aspects of new approaches to justice (https://leticialistening.com/spaces-restorative-transitional-justice/).
Hammond maintains an active art practice: in 2023 she was artist-in-residence at La Napoule Art Foundation in France, where she will participate in a group exhibition on art and nature in 2024. Her work was featured in the Fall 2023 issue of the journal Art Seen (https://rb.gy/cfn9w9). Hammond's solo and collaborative studio work can be viewed at cynthiahammond.org.
Address: Concordia University is located in Tiohtià:ke, on the unceded territory of the Kanien’kehá:ka people, also known as Montréal, Québec, Canada.
Hammond is full Professor in Concordia’s Department of Art History, where she teaches the history of the built environment as well as courses on feminist and spatial theory, interdisciplinary practice/research-creation, and oral history. Hammond has directed two federally-funded oral history research-creation projects about the built environment: "La ville extraordinaire", which geolocates the stories of over 200 Montrealers on an interactive platform (https://rs-atlascine.concordia.ca/la-ville-extraordinaire/index.html) and "The Spaces of Restorative and Transitional Justice", which uses oral history and spatial analysis to explore the spatial aspects of new approaches to justice (https://leticialistening.com/spaces-restorative-transitional-justice/).
Hammond maintains an active art practice: in 2023 she was artist-in-residence at La Napoule Art Foundation in France, where she will participate in a group exhibition on art and nature in 2024. Her work was featured in the Fall 2023 issue of the journal Art Seen (https://rb.gy/cfn9w9). Hammond's solo and collaborative studio work can be viewed at cynthiahammond.org.
Address: Concordia University is located in Tiohtià:ke, on the unceded territory of the Kanien’kehá:ka people, also known as Montréal, Québec, Canada.
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Publications by Cynthia Hammond
As Hammond demonstrates, wealthy patrons, sex workers, symbols of idealized femininity and Edwardian feminist activists all made powerful spatial interventions in Bath's built environment. Yet little of that impact is known, much less recognized in the city's public history. This book presents the ways in which women of all classes shaped the buildings and landscapes of one of England's most architecturally significant cities. But this book is also an intervention into Bath's public memory; in it, the author describes how her site-specific works of art were strategic means to bring her archival findings to a broader public. Through both art and research, an interdisciplinary approach to the city, Hammond aims to transform as well as critique the urban image of Bath. At once a performative literature, an extensively researched history, and a feminist guide to the city, Architects, Angels, Activists engages with current struggles over urban signification in Bath and beyond.
their bodies – were at the forefront of this process and the resulting artwork, which took the form of two “talking walks” in 2018-19. Here, we foreground the intergenerational methodology that underpinned our process, and how our weekly dialogues with the participants reshaped the second half of the project. We present Promenade parlante as an example of intergenerational “co-creation” (Frisch 1990) that challenged our research team to find strategies that would empower our participants to see themselves
as the urban experts that they are.
Joyce Wieland (1930-1998) is second only to Emily Carr as Canada’s most famous woman artist. Wieland is valued for her diverse output, her experimentation with different media, and her idiosyncratic embrace of feminism, nationalism, and ecology. Yet towards the end of her highly productive career, Wieland’s return to painting and drawing occasioned substantial criticism both for her work’s visual qualities, and for what some saw as the artist’s refusal to commit to one art form, or theme. Many observers in the 1980s (and later), casting about for a way to understand the complexity, subtlety, and irreducibility of Wieland’s body of work, seem to rely on an old art historical trope: assigning meaning to artworks via cause-and-effect biographical narratives. For women artists, especially older artists, the notion that an artist’s private life can somehow “explain” her artistic choices is fraught. Wieland is a case in point. Critics of Wieland’s art turned to the surface facts of her life to try to explain her production, one even suggesting that, “herself infertile, her artworks [were] her children.” If Wieland's art-making is reduced to the frustrated desire to have children, and critics find her later work lacking, then the implication is that these paintings and drawings were merely the failure of a woman to produce “real” art (or children) in the later years of her life.
I wrote this essay in the conviction that we, the art historical community in Canada, can do better. Why fall back on outdated patriarchal tropes of what constitutes good (biologically reproductive) femininity when the work itself is still waiting for our attention? One of my central goals in this essay is to sidestep the lingering historiographical emphasis on Wieland’s biography in order to give solid consideration to her later creative production. I argue that several major works in the last decade and a half of the artist’s professional life radically anticipate a subsequent generation’s fascination with interspecies vitality and the feminist concept of “becoming”. Equally, my interest lies in analysing these works in relation to Wieland’s thirty-year commitment to the landscape genre, and the sharpening, towards the end of her life, what I call a feminist, Arcadian vision. I explore Wieland’s 1983 painting, "She Will Remain in the Phenomenal World Filled with Ignorance With Her Sheep, and Not Go With Him"; "The Bloom of Matter", a small coloured pencil drawing from 1981; and one of the artist’s last paintings, a large work alternatively known as "Shaping Matter" and "Bolt" (1990-91). Each of these works could be read as a self-portrait of Wieland. I want to situate these works, however, in relation to a fourth creative project, the last house that Wieland owned in Toronto, which she called “Beaver Lodge”. Beaver Lodge was a substantial creative project that has only ever received passing mention in the literature on Wieland, and as such it is long overdue for scholarly consideration. My essay thus brings Beaver Lodge into dialogue with Wieland’s later paintings and drawings, arguing that Beaver Lodge represents a high point in Wieland’s cumulative, feminist, Arcadian vision. Throughout this essay, I refuse the methodological emphasis on Wieland’s biography by exploring her practice through a fragmentary autobiography of my own, specifically my own moments of direct contact, as a feminist artist, with Wieland and her oeuvre.
Berlin. The focus of this exploration is not Berlin’s iconic urban parks and forests
such as Teufelsfenn, Jungfernheide, or Tiergarten, but rather the uneven trajectory of the “green wedge,” an early-twentieth-century city planning tactic that surfaces in different ways in the decades following 1945 in Berlin. I use three texts to trace the uneven path of the green wedge. F. Brinkmann’s “Modern City Planning” (1910) introduces the green wedge as a carefully inserted slice of “nature” in the city that fosters the German people’s connection with the forests beyond. Herbert Sukopp et al.’s 1979 essay, “The Soil, Flora, and Vegetation of Berlin’s Wastelands” and Jouni Häkli’s 1996 paper, “Culture and Politics of Nature in the City: The Case of Berlin’s ‘Green Wedge’” help situate the ecology and politics of unplanned urban landscapes and forests in Berlin, pre- and post-unification, understanding how ruderal or self-seeded landscapes transformed Berlin, but were themselves subject to new forces in the form of urban revitalization.
To understand the recent cultural and ecological politics of the green wedge, I employ a case study: the green roof of the Canadian embassy in Berlin, designed in 2005 by Canada’s foremost landscape architect, Cornelia Hahn Oberlander. The embassy occupies a wedge-shaped portion of the historic, octagonal Leipziger Platz in central Berlin. Leipziger Platz was once part of the infamous “death strip,” the militarized land enclosed between the two sides of the Berlin Wall between 1961 and 1989. But this site has deeper social, design, and landscape histories prior to the Cold War, which are themselves important agents in the unfolding of the embassy’s present-day appearance. The link between my case study and the themes of this volume is the form that Hahn Oberlander chose: a fully functioning, miniature forest landscape. This chapter argues that urban landscapes, their ecology and their capacity to retain morphological links to key moments in the past, are crucial agents in the unfolding form of the city, and urban ecologies of the future.
As Hammond demonstrates, wealthy patrons, sex workers, symbols of idealized femininity and Edwardian feminist activists all made powerful spatial interventions in Bath's built environment. Yet little of that impact is known, much less recognized in the city's public history. This book presents the ways in which women of all classes shaped the buildings and landscapes of one of England's most architecturally significant cities. But this book is also an intervention into Bath's public memory; in it, the author describes how her site-specific works of art were strategic means to bring her archival findings to a broader public. Through both art and research, an interdisciplinary approach to the city, Hammond aims to transform as well as critique the urban image of Bath. At once a performative literature, an extensively researched history, and a feminist guide to the city, Architects, Angels, Activists engages with current struggles over urban signification in Bath and beyond.
their bodies – were at the forefront of this process and the resulting artwork, which took the form of two “talking walks” in 2018-19. Here, we foreground the intergenerational methodology that underpinned our process, and how our weekly dialogues with the participants reshaped the second half of the project. We present Promenade parlante as an example of intergenerational “co-creation” (Frisch 1990) that challenged our research team to find strategies that would empower our participants to see themselves
as the urban experts that they are.
Joyce Wieland (1930-1998) is second only to Emily Carr as Canada’s most famous woman artist. Wieland is valued for her diverse output, her experimentation with different media, and her idiosyncratic embrace of feminism, nationalism, and ecology. Yet towards the end of her highly productive career, Wieland’s return to painting and drawing occasioned substantial criticism both for her work’s visual qualities, and for what some saw as the artist’s refusal to commit to one art form, or theme. Many observers in the 1980s (and later), casting about for a way to understand the complexity, subtlety, and irreducibility of Wieland’s body of work, seem to rely on an old art historical trope: assigning meaning to artworks via cause-and-effect biographical narratives. For women artists, especially older artists, the notion that an artist’s private life can somehow “explain” her artistic choices is fraught. Wieland is a case in point. Critics of Wieland’s art turned to the surface facts of her life to try to explain her production, one even suggesting that, “herself infertile, her artworks [were] her children.” If Wieland's art-making is reduced to the frustrated desire to have children, and critics find her later work lacking, then the implication is that these paintings and drawings were merely the failure of a woman to produce “real” art (or children) in the later years of her life.
I wrote this essay in the conviction that we, the art historical community in Canada, can do better. Why fall back on outdated patriarchal tropes of what constitutes good (biologically reproductive) femininity when the work itself is still waiting for our attention? One of my central goals in this essay is to sidestep the lingering historiographical emphasis on Wieland’s biography in order to give solid consideration to her later creative production. I argue that several major works in the last decade and a half of the artist’s professional life radically anticipate a subsequent generation’s fascination with interspecies vitality and the feminist concept of “becoming”. Equally, my interest lies in analysing these works in relation to Wieland’s thirty-year commitment to the landscape genre, and the sharpening, towards the end of her life, what I call a feminist, Arcadian vision. I explore Wieland’s 1983 painting, "She Will Remain in the Phenomenal World Filled with Ignorance With Her Sheep, and Not Go With Him"; "The Bloom of Matter", a small coloured pencil drawing from 1981; and one of the artist’s last paintings, a large work alternatively known as "Shaping Matter" and "Bolt" (1990-91). Each of these works could be read as a self-portrait of Wieland. I want to situate these works, however, in relation to a fourth creative project, the last house that Wieland owned in Toronto, which she called “Beaver Lodge”. Beaver Lodge was a substantial creative project that has only ever received passing mention in the literature on Wieland, and as such it is long overdue for scholarly consideration. My essay thus brings Beaver Lodge into dialogue with Wieland’s later paintings and drawings, arguing that Beaver Lodge represents a high point in Wieland’s cumulative, feminist, Arcadian vision. Throughout this essay, I refuse the methodological emphasis on Wieland’s biography by exploring her practice through a fragmentary autobiography of my own, specifically my own moments of direct contact, as a feminist artist, with Wieland and her oeuvre.
Berlin. The focus of this exploration is not Berlin’s iconic urban parks and forests
such as Teufelsfenn, Jungfernheide, or Tiergarten, but rather the uneven trajectory of the “green wedge,” an early-twentieth-century city planning tactic that surfaces in different ways in the decades following 1945 in Berlin. I use three texts to trace the uneven path of the green wedge. F. Brinkmann’s “Modern City Planning” (1910) introduces the green wedge as a carefully inserted slice of “nature” in the city that fosters the German people’s connection with the forests beyond. Herbert Sukopp et al.’s 1979 essay, “The Soil, Flora, and Vegetation of Berlin’s Wastelands” and Jouni Häkli’s 1996 paper, “Culture and Politics of Nature in the City: The Case of Berlin’s ‘Green Wedge’” help situate the ecology and politics of unplanned urban landscapes and forests in Berlin, pre- and post-unification, understanding how ruderal or self-seeded landscapes transformed Berlin, but were themselves subject to new forces in the form of urban revitalization.
To understand the recent cultural and ecological politics of the green wedge, I employ a case study: the green roof of the Canadian embassy in Berlin, designed in 2005 by Canada’s foremost landscape architect, Cornelia Hahn Oberlander. The embassy occupies a wedge-shaped portion of the historic, octagonal Leipziger Platz in central Berlin. Leipziger Platz was once part of the infamous “death strip,” the militarized land enclosed between the two sides of the Berlin Wall between 1961 and 1989. But this site has deeper social, design, and landscape histories prior to the Cold War, which are themselves important agents in the unfolding of the embassy’s present-day appearance. The link between my case study and the themes of this volume is the form that Hahn Oberlander chose: a fully functioning, miniature forest landscape. This chapter argues that urban landscapes, their ecology and their capacity to retain morphological links to key moments in the past, are crucial agents in the unfolding form of the city, and urban ecologies of the future.