Meet the Artist: Gary Hammond

Gary is a percussionist who hits, shakes, whacks and generally makes a racket with as many instruments as he can. His collection of instruments come from all over the world and are very easy to play. They are used for grooves and rhythm work or as sound scales to accompany poems, stories and songs.

Gary has been working with darts now for over 10 years. He says:

There have been many fabulous memories working for darts! A stand-out moment for me is when a participant in Creative Directions brought in a very personal poem about how he got the injuries that impacted on his life. He was open and proud and we took the poem as a group and worked it into a rhythm/sound scape.

Gary had to change the way that he creates and shares his work quite a bit for darts at Home. He used video and audio for teaching projects and workshops and says “When you teach live you can change and move the class quickly if needed, but online it’s static. It means that you need more thought and planning to keep it as interesting as possible and to still come across as the artist that the participants know. It’s been a learning curve but I think it’s going to be a useful tool that we will use more in the future.”

So far for darts at Home, Gary created a cup song video as well as some paper based activity packs, with matching videos, all around junk percussion. These incorporate basic ideas and lead into accompaniment for stories. Gary has been part of some of the group songs and videos that musicians have collaborated on such as the All Aboard Introduction Film.