Bill Hammond: Jingle Jangle Morning
Bill Hammond: Jingle Jangle Morning
17 November 2007 - 10 February 2008
Hammond is perhaps the only New Zealand painter to have so strongly claimed a motif – birds. He became hooked on them after a trip to the Auckland Islands with fellow artists in 1989. Hammond spoke of the islands as a kind of lost world, ruled over by beak and claw: "The Auckland Islands are like New Zealand before people got here. It’s bird land." Confronted with this “paradise free from predators” as he described it, he began to paint a new race of sentient bird creatures into his works.
Bill Hammond’s compositions encompass humour, beauty, and lyricism while reflecting a unique expression of New Zealand’s cultural landscape. This spectacular exhibition includes early music inspired paintings, as well as Hammond’s Walter Buller series painted after his visit to the sub-Antarctic, through to the startling zoomorphic paintings, ancestral studies and recent work that takes the extinct Giant New Zealand Eagle as its theme.
Hammond’s luscious palette of inky blues, his signature use of emerald green and gold and his endlessly inventive combination of anthropomorphic birds, horses and hybrid creatures offers viewers a unique insight into the oeuvre of this singular artist.
“An original” – known for his sense of humor and irony, Bill Hammond occupies a unique place in New Zealand art history, with a language and technique that is wholly his own Bill Hammond: Jingle Jangle Morning is centred on the theme of music in Hammond’s work; the title comes from the Bob Dylan song Hey Mr Tambourine Man but is also the name of one of Hammond’s opulent paintings. A practicing musician himself, music has been a constant throughout Hammond’s career and he speaks of his paintings as being like instrumentals “laid out flat”.