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 Waiwhetu.

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

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)

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)

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)

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