XUT

Laurence Aberhart and Bill Hammond lived for nearly a decade very near to each other on the Banks Peninsula. The pair met standing on the street in Akaroa in the early 1970s and shortly after both moved to Lyttelton.

After brief stints with other occupations – Bill as a toymaker & sign writer and Laurence as a teacher, among other things – each dedicated themselves full-time to art making, exhibiting at the Brook Gifford Gallery in Christchurch and then later, here at the Peter McLeavey Gallery in Wellington.

Over their independent, decades-long careers, each artist emerged as a leading figure in his respective field.

Laurence's black and white photographs became an "indelible record of Aotearoa/New Zealand ... a detailed and ongoing investigation of its people, landscape and history" and Bill's otherworldly paintings – first of modern life and then of landscapes populated by bird figures – emblems of myth-making.

XUT brings together work by two friends, two artists, two singular people, to celebrate an artist's life.