Watching for Buller. 2
On loan to the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū from the artist
The renowned and highly influential New Zealand artist Bill Hammond passed away at home in Lyttelton at the end of last month.
A student at the University of Canterbury’s Ilam School of Fine Arts between 1966 and 1968, Hammond showed from an early period a fiercely independent and self determined streak that would emerge later in his painting.
But Hammond’s creative interests and facility were not limited to one artform and so his post artschool years saw him working as a jewellery designer and wooden toy maker, before returning to painting in the early eighties. This in many respects would be the decade that defined and made Hammond into the artist who we celebrate to this day.
It was in this period that he started to generate a whole raft of richly layered, gritty, sardonic and beguiling paintings that were optically and conceptually completely unique.
These works had a strange etheral quality where a whole cast of mutant, freakish and uncanny figures restlessly communicated and moved through a range of arcade-like scenes seemingly at odds with the very world that they occupied.
These paintings were both a hedonistic celebration and damning commentary on the increasingly urbanized and globalized world that New Zealand was becoming in this era, they spoke very much to the period in which they were created, but also knowingly looked forward to the time in which we find ourselves today.
Hammond was a visionary whose work garnered a cult following among his peers and also a younger generation of artists, who were inspired and found solace in this artist’s punkish works and attitude to the artworld establishment.
This standing as being an artist’s artist never faded, but his place within a grander New Zealand art narrative went through a substantial shift in the nineties.
This can be traced back to Hammond’s visit to the sub-Antarctic Auckland Island in 1989, which would inspire his acclaimed ‘birdland’ paintings that would largely occupy his visual field over the subsequent decades.
If Hammond’s early visual escapades had a mesmerizing labyrinthen quality, then his zoomorphic bird-people series had a tranquil and even majestic quality that imposed itself on its audiences.
These are unwaveringly beautiful and complex paintings that are self-assured in their delineation and hauntingly memorable in their composition. It is these paintings that made Hammond a household name and saw his work increasingly sought after by private and public art collections.
But even more than this, they are part of an artistic legacy, which has left an indelible mark on how we look at our world and ourselves, and whose premutations are still well beyond being fully appreciated at this time.
Hammond was an exceptional and rare artist who will be greatly missed by those who knew him and vicariously by the people who have and will continue to experience his wonderous artistic offerings well into the future.
Waiting for Buller. Bar
On loan to the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū from the artist.
These works are currently on display at Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū.
