Petrol Head Sculpture

1937. Originally from Detroit, Philip Hammial arrived in Australia in 1972. A self-taught artist, he has had thirty solo exhibitions and has participated in over seventy group exhibitions, including two in Paris. His primarily figurative sculpture is constructed with found objects: steel, brass, copper, wood, cloth and occasionally plastic and is held together with screws, bolts & nuts, wire, nails and glue (he has deliberately not learned to weld). He makes them quickly, in a light trance, following the dictates of the materials at hand. There is no theory behind them: Hammial refuses to justify his products with Artspeak (a language of which he is ignorant in any case). The pieces are simply what they are: creatures of the imagination.He is also a poet with, to date, twenty-four published collections, two of which were short-listed for a NSW Premiers Award (the Kenneth Slessor Prize), Bread in 2001 & In the Year of Our Lord Slaughters Children in 2004. His poems have appeared in twenty-two anthologies of Australian poetry and in 89 magazines in eleven countries. Hammial has represented Australia at five major overseas poetry festivals, most recently (April 2009) at the Micro-Festival in Prague & Brno. In 2009/10 he had a six month residency at the Cite International des Arts in Paris.As the director of The Australian Collection of Outsider Art, Hammial has curated or helped to organize twenty-six exhibitions of Australian Outsider Art in Australia, Germany, France, Belgium and the U.S. The most recent exhibition Australian Outsiders featured twenty-two artists. It spent six months at the Halle Saint Pierre in Paris and was very well received.A compulsive traveller, Hammial has spent a total of eleven years travelling in 81 countries, many of them on several ocassions.At 12 I decided I wanted to see the world, this after reading the adventures of Colin Glencannon, Scot engineer on a tramp freighter, Richard Haliburtons adventures & hearing Lowell Thomas radio reports on his trip into Tibet on foot shortly after the end of the Second World War. So when I graduated from high school I decided to get a job on a salt-water freighter only to discover I was too young. Telling a visiting uncle about this problem, he suggested I join the US Navy, which I did, the next day. Three years (1954-57) in the engine rooms of two ships, it was a great beginning.