Bill Hammond ‘Snares’

“Just as the eagle is always avid for its prey, Hammond’s humaniforms are eager to assert their life. They stretch out towards others in tensile flashes of music or withdraw into grave and meditative silence.”1

Ron Brownson

Bill Hammond is best-known for his iconic bird paintings. The haunting avian humanoid figures began appearing in his work after his well-documented trip to Enderby Island in 1989, and continued to evolve over the subsequent span of his life and painting career. Initially, these figures evoked the artist’s concerns about extinction and the prospect of ecological catastrophe. Later, they took on an otherworldly quality, as if spiritual guardians or watchers, engaged in esoteric rituals or rites.

Painted in 1995, Snares offers a window into the development of Hammond’s central motif. At first glance, the work presents the viewer with a sequence of bird figures, approaching, evading, or caught in snares. In this image, these birds are vulnerable, prone to capture and probable death. In keeping with this subject matter, the palette is dark and moody. Hammond’s background paint-handling is expressive and vigorous, whereas in the figurative foreground it is more deliberate and careful. Compositionally, the figures are grouped in threes, receding in size and creating an enticing sense of movement throughout the picture plane – this compositional finesse is a hallmark of Hammond’s work throughout his career.

In the years leading up to painting Snares, Hammond created his Buller series. Presenting numerous bird-figures, the Buller paintings were one of the artist’s first steps away from the noirish comic-book style of painting that had characterised his 1980s work as he moved toward the subject matter that would come to define his oeuvre. In a 2007 text, curator Ron Brownson wrote, “Hammond’s Buller paintings are both homage to scientist and author Sir Walter Lawry Buller and a formidable criticism of his research. This crucial series affirms Buller’s skill and innovation in ornithology but also damns his reputation as a marauding trophy hunter who assisted with the extinction of New Zealand bird species.”2 Hammond’s 1993 painting Watching for Buller. 2 is a prime example from this series, presenting a striking yet watchful grouping of birds.

From the late 1990s, Hammond’s bird figures had adopted the more iconographic and ritualistic character seen in works such as Hokey Pokey from 1998 and Zoomorphic Lounge III from 1999. Brownson summed up these distinctions, writing, “While his earlier paintings seem to consider the dark and bloody pain of humanity and the possibility of our own extinction, Hammond’s paintings now unearth extinct species in order to discover their resurrection. In recent years Hammond’s work has encompassed moods of heroic elegy. Through his avian themes he has developed a deeper, more stilled narrative that meditates upon our primordial natural history.”3

Snares sits somewhere between the dark and the elegiac, both in style and in chronology. These figures are not yet the majestic creatures that appeared from the later 1990s on. Nor are they the terse and haunted avian watchers from the Buller paintings. In spite of the snares that bind them and threaten their survival, these birds are poised, primed to step into the full realisation of one of the most distinctive and powerful artistic motifs in the history of New Zealand art.

Julian McKinnon

1 Ron Brownson, “Hammond’s Humaniforms”. In Bill Hammond: Jingle Jangle Morning (Christchurch: Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū), 2007. Pp 51-59. 59.

2 Ibid. 55. 3 Ibid. 59.