Bill Hammond

Bill Hammond was born in Christchurch, New Zealand in 1947. He has exhibited widely since the early 1980s, and more recently represented New Zealand at the Asia Pacific Triennial 1999 in Brisbane, Australia and the Sydney Biennale, 2000, Sydney, Australia.

Curator Robert Leonard writes, for the exhibition:

...'Wired, paranoid, hyped-up, his paintings (of the late 1980s) were junky, punky and dystopian - juiced up with sadistic speed-freak cartoon-violence. They offered no pastoral idyll or redemptive promised land, but a deregulated incubator-world super-heated with information.  A major shift came in the early 1990s after Hammond returned from a trip to the remote Auckland Islands, where there are no people and birds still rule the roost. Inspired, Hammond imagined himself in Old New Zealand, before even the Maori had arrived. He developed surreal paintings of birds-becoming-people, with echoes of ornithological illustration, colonial topological landscape painting, comics, children's books, history painting, Hieronymous Bosch, Grandville, Max Ernst's Lolop and, crucially, Buller's Birds. Offering an odd spin on postcolonial politics, Hammond's bird-people were floating signifiers, referring at once to the birds there before the Maori, to the Maori who harvested the birds, and to the Pakeha who later dealt to the Maori.' Leonard's full wall text is displayed at the AAG during Nine Lives.