B.

Suite of three

There’s no big break. It’s just a slow game. —Bill Hammond, 2002

Bill Hammond: Playing the Drums (3 August 2019 – 19 January 2020)

Rock drummers and guitarists, classical musicians, DJs and flamboyant lead singers have made regular appearances in Bill’s work over the years. They are often accompanied by song titles and lyrics – The Tattooed Bride, The Look of Love, Love Will Tear Us Apart, Radio On, All Shook Up, Not Fade Away, Lose This Skin and You Make My Heart Sing. One of Bill’s early exhibitions at the Brooke Gifford Gallery in central Christchurch was titled Lines from Songs, in which he showed paintings that specifically referenced his favourite songs alongside set designs for The South Island (A Rock Opera) in four acts. The title for this painting, Radio On, is a lyric taken from one of the most iconic, upbeat rockin’ anthems of the 1970s by Jonathan Richmond and the Modern Lovers. The chorus, simply “radio on”, is one that all can sing along to – and indeed in the painting the freakish characters doing a duet, with their volcano mouths and noses, are in full voice and raising the roof: And I say roadrunner once / Roadrunner twice / I’m in love with rock & roll and I’ll be out all night … I’m in love with the radio on. Bill Hammond: Playing the Drums (3 August 2019 – 19 January 2020)

Bill’s take on Bruegel’s sixteenth-century masterpiece Landscape with the Fall of Icarus is populated with serious, enigmatic bird creatures watching from their treetop perches as one of their own takes wing and fails to fly, crashing centre stage. These birds have been a motif for Bill since the early 1990s, representing the colonised and colonisers of Aotearoa New Zealand. Here, they occupy a primordial time before human habitation. Bill had nineteenth-century bird stuffers like Walter Buller in mind when he painted these birds. Some hold on to branches, needing that reassuring grasp lest they fall off their perch, while others are ghostlike, stretched out in crucifix poses, as if they, too, are about to fall into the abyss of extinction.

Bill Hammond: Playing the Drums (3 August 2019 – 19 January 2020)

In 1989 Bill and several other New Zealand artists travelled to the remote sub-Antarctic Auckland Islands, a trip that was to have a profound effect on his art. Here, he encountered what he called “paradise for birds”, a place he imagined Aotearoa was like before humans arrived. In his words: [In the Auckland Islands] I saw a New Zealand before there were men and women and dogs and possums. You could see what New Zealand was like, a land of birds. In the Auckland Islands you can stand by 20,000 birds and they don’t take fright, they think they are hallucinating … you can pass by hundreds of yellow-eyed penguins staring out at the horizon in a Zen-like trance. We’d become freakish apparitions. …You feel like a time traveller … as if you have just stumbled upon it – primeval forests, rātās like Walt Disney would make. It’s a beautiful place, but it’s also full of ghosts, shipwrecks, death.

Bill Hammond: Playing the Drums (3 August 2019 – 19 January 2020)