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)

For the exhibition Wunderbox (28 November 2008 - 15 February 2009), this work was displayed with the following label.

Bill Hammond led one of the most influential tendencies in New Zealand painting of the late 1990s – Post-colonial Gothic. Shag Pile is one of his many paintings inspired by nineteenth-century campaigns to catalogue New Zealand’s dwindling native species, in particular the efforts of Walter Lowry Buller. The contradictions of Buller’s character – a recorder and chronicler of birds who killed and stuffed many – have made him a figure of fascination not only for Hammond but also for sculptor Warren Viscoe and playwright Nick Drake. In Shag Pile, Buller’s campaign plays out like a bad dream projected on the patterned walls of a claustrophobic Victorian parlour, where New Zealand spotted shags are heaped, laid out for processing, and sealed under bell jars.

Turning a traditional depiction of the New Zealand landscape upside down, this vertical triptych presents a zigzagging arrangement of curtains that fall from the sky and splice the terrain, of mountainous divides that appear upon tables and strange creatures that morph and writhe.

Early works by Bill Hammond are awash with visual sampling, splicing and mixing – from popular culture and art history. Comic book narration, the oblique angles and frames of 1950s film noir and, notably, the multiple vanishing points found in the proto-surrealist paintings of Giorgio De Chirico (1888–1978), give structure to Hammond’s alternative cityscapes of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Hammond was born in Christchurch and studied at the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts. For a period after leaving art school he designed and manufactured wooden toys. He held his first solo exhibition in 1976 and since then has exhibited regularly. His work is represented in private and public collections throughout New Zealand. Bill Hammond: Jingle Jangle Morning (20 July – 22 October 2007) is the most recent survey of Hammond’s work to date, organised by Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū.

Relief etching relating to the now extinct New Zealand eagle which has been a central theme in Hammond's work in recent years. Profile view of a human body with eagle head.

ceramic

“It’s bird land. 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 Bill Hammond sailed to the remote Auckland Islands, south of Aotearoa New Zealand towards Antarctica, in 1989. Its landscape made a profound impression on him. Lined up on cliffs, staring out at the ocean, the birds of the Auckland Islands were unafraid of people, and Hammond imagined that Aotearoa looked very similar before human habitation. Different stories and timeframes and images collide in his canvasses as if in a dream, or as if fragments of consciousness were projected on to a screen. “I don’t have a tight brief”, he says. “I fumble around history, picking up bits and pieces.”

(Te Wheke, 2020)

Gertrude Demain Hammond was a prolific London illustrator who was also active in exhibiting her watercolours. A Reading from Plato was shown at the Royal Academy in London in 1903 before coming to Christchurch for the 1906–07 New Zealand International Exhibition. There it was purchased by the avid local art collector James Jamieson, who with his brother William, ran one of the city’s largest construction companies.

Following his death in 1927, James’s family presented many works of art from his collection to become part of the Robert McDougall Art Gallery’s founding collection, which at its opening in 1932 consisted of 160 paintings and sculptures.

(Treasury: A Generous Legacy 18 December 2015 – 27 November 2016)

This work was displayed with this label to mark the artist's death in 2021:

All of us at Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū were very saddened to hear of the death of Bill Hammond in late January, and our thoughts are with Bill’s family and friends. Bill’s contribution to the art of Aotearoa New Zealand was original and unforgettable, and he occupied a special, beloved place within the arts communities of Ōtautahi Christchurch and Whakaraupō Lyttelton.

Bill was raised in Christchurch and attended the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts in the late 1960s. In 1989, he joined a number of other New Zealand artists on an expedition to the sub-Antarctic and the Auckland Islands. This trip had a profound effect on the artist; it was from this point that his highly regarded bird paintings emerged in his practice.

Bill’s paintings are favourites for many of our visitors – works they return to over and over again. His wry sense of humour and generosity of spirit (once you got past that famous reserve) will be missed by many here at the Gallery. Recently, we had been working closely with Bill on a new publication focussed on his paintings from the past 15 years, which includes numerous tributes by artists to Bill and his work. Bill had that rare quality in an artist – someone who is highly regarded by his peers, and whose works appeal to people from all walks of life. We were honoured to have the opportunity to work with him this one last time.

Bill will be missed. We mark his passing with the deepest of respect.

This print appears as 'Edward Hammond Hargraves. The discoverer of gold in Australia.' on page 740 of the 'Picturesque Atlas of Australasia.'