Painter, printmaker, sculptor, and photographer Valerie Hammond explores the nuances and fluidity of identity in her exquisitely rendered and detailed work, combining images of flora, fauna, and the human body to convey both the external and internal forces by which we are shaped. “I am interested in evoking sensation and making work which is corporeal in nature,” she explains. Like Kiki Smith, with whose work hers is closely aligned and with whom she has been exhibited, Hammond often fragments the female form, isolating hands, arms, and heads to highlight the redolence of specific gestures—like curling fingers, a bent elbow, or a flat palm. Her fascination with mystery and layered meanings, which she finds in Christian shrines, devotional objects, and votive offerings as well as Tibetan medical drawings and Buddhist statuary, informs her practice and animates her deeply expressive works.