Hermine Ford’s unusually shaped surfaces are derived from the breakdown of built structure and reuse and recontextualization of materials throughout time. Ford’s works present as artifacts, collaged pieces of ancient broken mosaic, cave painting, or stone wall, interacting with sharp shapes in flat color. The ambiguous references create a sense of a common history, a shared experience of damage and revival, remnants of all of humanity’s enclosures and facades instead of a certain culture or epoch. The collapse of human exertion and structure is paid homage to in a poetic reassembly of forms from history and today, familiar yet reimagined.
Ford utilizes small square modules, conjuring mosaics in Pompeii and simultaneously pixels on a screen. Clusters of muted units in grays and neutrals are interrupted by large geometric shapes; skewed four-pointed stars, triangles, lopsided trapezoids. The freshness of the contemporary shaped surfaces and bold, flat color are almost at odds with the laborious tile-like detail. The works demonstrate a respect for the grid’s organizational endeavor as well as its disintegration. The shape-based works encourage a connection to large built structures, but the artist’s touch is felt in every line, mark, and surface. The collision of the two scales of marks creates a dynamic viewing experience, as ones’ eyes move frenziedly through the static-like tile, with interludes of a few prominent, toppling shapes.
Her drawings offer a less polished, more automatic version of the paintings. The paper provides a rectangle to hold the shards of form and fossilize the liquidity of the paint. As a gallery wall is activated by the shaped canvases, the space of the paper offers a contained field of play for Ford’s hand.
Ford was born in 1939 in New York, NY. She studied at Antioch College and the Yale School of Art and Architecture. She currently lives and works in New York City and Nova Scotia.
