Artist uses alphabet of images -- butterflies, Sumo wrestlers, Gandhi -- to confuse and delight

SOUTH HADLEY, Mass. -- If language has the ability to conjure images, Jane Hammond's looks like this: fluttering butterflies, Sumo wrestlers and Gandhi's head.\nSince the late 1980s, the New York artist has created an alphabet of 276 images taken from books, magazines and photographs that she strings together in seemingly random ways that can confuse and delight a viewer.\nWhat, for example, is Elvis doing on a matchbook cover affixed to a piece of paper that shares space with a cross-legged Buddha? Why is a bear towering over Gandhi's head as it emerges from a mountainside lake? The answers are pretty much up to the viewer, Hammond says.\n"I am genuinely interested in how meaning is constructed," said the artist, whose works are being displayed at Mount Holyoke College in "Jane Hammond: Paper Work."\n"Using a fixed set of components in my work allows me to make meaning and examine how meaning is made," 56-year-old Hammond said.\nThe work of 1972 graduate of Mount Holyoke, Hammond's pieces have been featured at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, the Contemporary Museum in Honolulu and the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art.\nWhile her works seem to spring from an arbitrary sense of design, everything in them has a sense of order that Hammond likens to strands of DNA. Because she works with a limited number of images, patterns of repetition begin to emerge, especially in her collage--like creations.\n"If I only had 39 images, everything would've been too cute and gamey and pat," Hammond said. "And if there were 5,000, I'd be 85 before anyone figured out there was repetition and a system."\nShe has limited her iconic lexicon to 276 for no other reason than she figured that's exactly what she needs.\nJust because the same cymbal-clapping seal appears in a few of her works, the creature isn't necessarily meant to evoke the same meaning each time.\nA digital image of an anchor used in one place could conjure a connection with the sea, while the same image reproduced with a stamp could give the feeling of rust and decay, Hammond said.\n"Her work isn't about beauty, per se, but I find it ravishingly beautiful," said Marianne Doezema, director of Mount Holyoke's art museum.\nHammond's work also uses materials that are not often combined. She puts together whatever seems to grab her interest -- Xeroxes, watercolor, rubber stamps, bits of plastic toys and feather boas -- to create pieces that she calls drawings and "unique paper objects."\nIn "My Heavens," Hammond sandwiches a sheet of Mylar between paper to create a sparkling constellation of Sumo wrestlers, hula dancers, lobsters, wishbones and other icons taken from her list of 276 images. The result is both familiar and odd. There's nothing unusual about sky charts, but what's that kayaking Eskimo doing on it?\nThe exhibition also features two of Hammond's "maps," the artist's latest creations and perhaps her easiest to digest.\nUsing heavy handmade papers, Hammond has plotted out places such as Uganda, Sudan, Cuba and Cordoba, Spain, and affixed paper butterflies to them. She goes to great lengths to make the butterflies look real, taking digital photographs of the actual insects, then overlaying those images on paper butterfly cutouts. Horsehair and false eyelashes give the paper reproductions a lifelike quality.\n"She creates a great tension between what's real and what's not real," Doezema said.\nEven the idea for the butterfly maps comes from a place somewhere between reality and imagination. Inspired by an overload of news about the war in Iraq, Hammond dreamed of a map of the Middle East covered in butterflies.\n"I wanted to put the conflict and turmoil associated with a place against the beauty of a butterfly," she said, emphasizing the insect's transformation from a sluggish caterpillar to a free-floating butterfly. "It all has to do with the notion of living and dying in these places."\n"Paper Work" closes at Mount Holyoke Dec. 17 and will travel for two years to museums in Arizona, Wisconsin, Arkansas, New York, California and Michigan.