Max Hammond Statement - Clay Sculptures

When does safeguarding become a choice and not a necessity ? 

Max Hammond unapologetically presents clay phallus sculptures crystallised, to challenge shame by turning it into a spectacle. Hammond’s installations use crystal-encrusted penis motifs as central figures in this series to explore personal and collective narratives. Deliberately foregrounding the penis as both symbol and subject—a site loaded with cultural assumptions, contradictions, and expectation. By combining the seductive and light-catching qualities of crystals, with the rawness of bodily form, it interrogates the tension between fragility and bravado, pleasure and pain, resilience and exposure. 

The canvas “GAY DENIAL” acts as a central point for the sculptures to correspond with. Thus, combined with the change of colour palette, shifts in tonal value, creates a playful, childlike nuance in the space, which is immediately suppressed given the context of the canvas painting. Incorporating embellishment and embroidery methods to commentate on feminine stereotypes surrounding domesticity.  This series  situates itself in between this Intersection between being a man but viewed as a female for sexual preference. Raising the question, is this craft rather than art?.

Hammond transforms environments, inviting viewers into a space where vulnerability, sexual experience, and personal trauma can be expressed freely and without judgement. Inducing unapologetic language for camp aesthetics and reclaiming stigmatised symbols, the kitsch-adorned sculptures create shameless spaces for the expression of queerness and endurance. Provoking immediate reactions and unfiltered commentary. 

Using autotheory as a type of writing to reflect, dissect and protect himself from abuse, Hammond recontextualises  materials by re-examining his childhood and reinterpreting key aspects of his childhood which were withheld. Safety, security, and self-worth, which are key themes which run throughout this collective where Hammond combines both low-value, heavily manufactured materials with some of the most expensive. Questioning the long-lasting impact instability in childhood can have on perceived self-worth and value. Combining rhinestones with Swarovski crystals, glass rhinestones with diamonds and air-dry clay with 18k Yellow Gold.

Toying with scale, objects transformed from sculptures to living vessels, showcasing Hammond’s lived reality of torment by men. Acting as extensions of Hammond’s resilient flesh, wounded by relentless grief. The phallic forms, queer and loaded, reclaim hurt and power, confronting the lines between shame and pride. Offering these objects not as jokes or provocations, but as invitations to participate in honest conversations, surrounding these aching subjects.