In the Garden of Eden

“Mornings were the best at Wainui. Fresh bush smell. The birds welcoming the new day with sweet chorus. And the light slowly moving across the bedroom wall, panning over the painted birds. Gold on gold and on to the curved beak and red wattle. 

Yes, we were in the garden too. How lucky was I to wake inside a Bill Hammond painting.”

- Jane McBride

Imagine a little green house with a rusted roof, deep in Bank’s Peninsula bush. 

The inner walls and rafters covered in Bill hammond’s compulsive creations. Around an old pot-bellied stove, hardly a surface spared. All alongside directions on how to use the outside water tank and the key to the long drop.  

Bill Hammond died in 2021. His tiny bach in Wainui sold earlier this year. Rescued from the walls are his verdant green, gold, birds and leaves. 

These paintings are far from the lights of a gallery. For quarter of a century they sat silently unseen amongst the tree shadows, only Bill and his wife Jane to live among them. 

Solace for Hammond was always found in the bush. As a child of the 1950s growing up in Christchurch, Hammond would spend summers attending the Wainui YMCA camp. Many years later he took the opportunity to buy his own home there as a retreat from the world.

Wainui was the perfect place to base himself; to create his haunting dreamscapes exploring humanity’s relationship to nature, memory, and primordial history. Being separate from the world, the feeling of being somewhere untouched by human hands was hugely important for Hammond. 

A pivotal shift in his practice came in the early 1990s after he returned from a three-week trip to the remote Auckland Islands. These remote, windswept islands where climatic extremes saw minimal human impact was revolutionary to Hammond. Arriving on the rocky shore, silently watched by vast numbers of huge sea birds. His recurring bird-people motif was born and rarely left his practice ever after. Hammond’s compositions blend humour, beauty, and lyricism, offering a distinctive reflection of New Zealand’s own cultural landscape.

'Untitled [Wainui Works]' c. 1998 stretch over 2.4 metres in height and there is much to take in from these two rich surfaces. Hammond painted with such a reverence to colour, choosing deep emerald-toned blues and gold washes to drip down the hardboard of his home.

Where there is austerity is in his use of white, so stark it roots the dream-like quality back into the tactile bush.

Soon after these two works were created, the late William McAloon reviewed a Hammond show at the Gallery. He described this period as Hammond at “the height of his painterly powers”.

Even on the walls of a cramped bach in the bush, Hammond’s technical virtuousity is to the fore. Totally in control of his composition but anchored in his love of nature and place. 

Pinned to the wall beside these two panels was a postcard McLeavey wrote to Bill from Golden Bay, writing while surrounded by tuis, bellbirds and Godwits. Entertained by their splendid dawn chorus.

“Yes, we are in the garden of Eden."

A small publication to accompany the show has been produced please email the Gallery to request a copy [email protected].