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This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).
Birds first appeared in Bill Hammond’s works around 1990, following a trip by the artist to the subantarctic islands. On their own territory, and largely unused to human contact, the subantarctic flocks stood their ground and stared back at the visitors. ‘The Auckland Islands are like New Zealand before people got here. It’s bird land,’ commented Hammond, who described feeling ‘like a time-traveller, as if you have just stumbled on primeval forests, ratas like Walt Disney would make. It’s a beautiful place, but it’s also full of ghosts, shipwrecks, death.’1 The bird motif soon resolved itself as a major subject — anthropomorphic renditions of birds that reference the work of the controversial ornithologist and collector Sir Walter Lawry Buller, who published his A history of the birds of New Zealand, with illustrations by Johannes G Keulemans, in 1873.
Land list lies somewhere between the paranoid interiors of Hammond’s early practice and the vertiginous forest landscapes of the later 1990s. An eight-panelled work painted on a folding screen (other grounds from this period include a doublebass case, a cupboard, and panels from a beer crate), here the bird characters are depicted in ambiguous landscape settings overwritten with texts from an urban milieu — ‘Gang Land’, ‘Logo Land’, ‘Leisure Land’, ‘Liquor Land’. As ever, it is unclear whether Hammond’s birds are the hunters or the hunted, the colonisers or the colonised. And the artist does not say: with only a couple of exceptions, he has resisted calls for personal insights into his work. While Land list references issues around the occupation of land in New Zealand, Hammond’s ultimate position remains unspoken.
Typically, Hammond’s images are caught in a continuous process of ‘becoming’.2 In Land list birds transform into snakes, a mountain range becomes a carpet, a colony of birds looking out to sea becomes the curve of a coastline. The images proliferate wildly, the effect being one of a gloriously baroque excess picked out in shot-velvet lowlights and ghostly pale highlights, underpinned by the drips, festoons, veils and greasy crusts of his paint. In Hammond’s bird lands, the fabulous implausibility of an aesthetic derived from sources as diverse as Japanese manga comics and ukiyo-e woodcuts, 1970s album cover art, and Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of earthly delights, c.1510 (Museo del Prado, Madrid) describes a rich, private world hovering somewhere between history, myth and imagination.
Lara Strongman
1 Bill Hammond, quoted in Gregory O’Brien, Lands and deeds: Profiles of contemporary New Zealand painters, Godwit, Auckland, 1996, p. 58.
2 Allan Smith, ‘Bill Hammond’s Parlement of Foules’, in Laurence Simmons and Philip Armstrong (eds), Knowing animals, Brill, Leiden, 2007, p. 160.
The Asia-Pacific region has always been the realm of navigators - from the Pacific voyagers who first reached the shores of Aotearoa New Zealand, to the British explorer James Cook.
It is appropriate, then, that this exhibition of contemporary art from Te Papa takes its name from the invisible lines used to navigate uncharted waters and, in Chinese medicine, to channel energy through the body. Meridian lines provide the possibility of mapping ourselves, as well as our place in the wider world.
The selected works reflect some of the many approaches to art-making that have developed in New Zealand over the last 40 years. They also illustrate the ways in which artistic forms and ideas have flowed between the various cultures that meet here - Māori, Pacific, European, and Asian.
Meridian Lines was first exhibited in 2012 at the new China Art Museum in Shanghai, alongside exhibitions from institutions including the British Museum, Rijksmuseum, and Whitney Museum of American Art.