Bill Hammond 'Snares'

In 2021, asked about his 1989 visit to Auckland Island, Bill Hammond said: ‘It’s bird land. You feel like a time-traveller, as if you have just stumbled upon it. It’s a beautiful place, but it’s also full of ghosts, shipwrecks, death.’ The bird people he began painting subsequently, and continued to paint for the rest of his life, shared human and avian characteristics. Most often, they were bird-headed humanoids, sometimes with wings and / or arms, sometimes without either. There were precedents: bird people occur in Polynesian iconography, notably on Rapanui but also in Aotearoa and other parts of the Pacific. Further back, there are the animal and bird headed gods of Ancient Egypt, amongst whom the ibis-headed Thoth, god of writing, bears the strongest resemblance to Hammond’s figures. Then there are the beings in Alistair Te Ariki Campbell’s poem ‘The Return’, set to music by Douglas Lilburn: Their heads finely shrunken to a skull, small / And delicate, with small black rounded beaks; / Their antique bird-like chatter…

Those which appear in the painting Snares — one of a series under that title exhibited at the Gregory Flint Gallery in Auckland in 1995 — lack both arms and wings. Seven, increasing in size from left to right, seem to progress upside down across the top of the picture. It is only when you realise that the seventh and largest of the figures has its left leg encircled by a rope that you understand you might be seeing something different from a procession. You can’t see the left feet of any of the six other figures: perhaps all of these bird people are trapped and suspended upside down the way carcasses used to be hung on the chain in the Freezing Works. This sinister possibility is confirmed, or at least supported, by the incipient fate of the four bird people at the bottom of the picture, each of which is climbing up towards another snare set in what look like the branches of a tree, but which also, and eerily, resemble birds’ claws. The twelfth and last figure protrudes, head only, almost eel-like, from the left into the picture plane with a veritable noose around its neck.

The drama enacted by these figures unfolds before a deep blue abyss at the heart of the picture, in which dim shapes can be intuited but not quite identified. Is it a night sky with clouds passing? Moonlight reflected from the waters of the sea? The atmosphere sometimes glimpsed between trees in the bush at dusk? Or something more definitively abstract? The bird people themselves are painted in pale luminous shades of red, aqua, blue, grey and white and seem to emit a soft radioactive glow. Wherever they are going and why they are going there, you cannot help but suppose it is to their doom. And while they seem acquiescent, if not oblivious, to their fate, at the same time there is a kind of splendour to their passing: the transient splendour, perhaps, of the march to extinction.

Who placed the snares is another question. The short answer is of course Bill Hammond himself; but that is not the way to understand the picture. According to one account, when Hammond was asked where he got his ideas for his paintings, he replied that he painted everything carried in the air between his finger and his thumb as he walked along. An inscrutable but also a magnificent reply. ‘What Hammond actually intended is hard to say,’ wrote Allen Smith in his essay ‘Bill Hammond’s Parliament of Foules’, ‘but what an apt alibi for a painter of aerial visions that contract and expand between the miniaturizations of petite decorative friezes and the epic scale of panoramic prospects. Hammond’s cryptic analogy is also a way of affirming an implicit assumption of his art: that the fantastic is always close at hand, and that whimsical metaphors are endemic.’ In other words, with Snares, as with so many of Hammond’s works, there is no prescribed reading; contemplating its enigmatic glory you are free to imagine anything you like.