Name: Bone Yard Dinner
Location: Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū

Bone Yard Dinner

Bill Hammond Bone Yard Open Home, Cave Painting 4, Convocation of Eagles (detail) 2008. Acrylic on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and McLeavey Gallery

Event

Past event

$350

In these dark days we need something to look forward to.

Join us for a feast like no other.

An exclusive 100 seat dinner by Vaughan Mabee, Cuisine’s 2019 Chef of the Year, in an art experience inspired by the dark caves of Bill Hammond.

For information or tickets, contact Jacq Mehrtens on 021 404 042 or jacq@christchurchartgallery.org.nz.

Related reading: Foundation, Bill Hammond

Bill Hammond: Playing the Drums

3 August 2019 – 19 January 2020

A selection of work by Aotearoa New Zealand's favourite painter/drummer

Bill Hammond: Jingle Jangle Morning

20 July – 22 October 2007

The long-awaited exhibition is a spectacular survey of more than two decades of work by one of New Zealand's leading contemporary painters.

Bill Hammond The Fall of Icarus (after Bruegel)

“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)

Commentary

The Edge of the Sea

A vision of New Zealand’s past from 1995:

Europeans first imagined New Zealand as “a garden and a pasture in which the best elements of British society might grow into an ideal nation”... When the smoke of the colonists’ fires cleared at the end of the 19th century, New Zealand had become a different country. Māori had lost their most precious life-support system. Only in the hilliest places did the forest still come down to the sea. Huge slices of the ancient ecosystem were missing, evicted and extinguished. Our histories, however, have had neither the sense of place nor ecological consciousness to explain what has happened.

Continued

Commentary

Caveat Collectors

Extinction has claimed nearly fifty per cent of Aotearoa New Zealand’s bird species over the past 650 years. The persistent myth has it that European settlement in the nineteenth century swept away a pristine past. And most obviously, because we know their names and can catalogue (literally) their infamy, that story includes the professional bird collectors as the cause of those extinctions.

Continued

Commentary

Doctor Jazz Stomp and the Webb Lane Sound

“Bill Hammond is long, lithe and tired, and was born several years ago. Is currently pursuing a Fine Arts course and trying hard to catch up. He is deeply interested in the aesthetic implications of sleep, sports the Rat-Chewed Look in coiffures for ’68, and dreams about blind mice in bikinis. He has never been known to sing outside the confines of his bedroom. Shows a marked but languid preference for the subtle textural nuances and dynamic shadings of washboard, cowbell, woodblocks, claves, cymbal, spoons, thimbles, tambourine, and the palms of the hands in percussive contact.”

Continued