Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs. The birds of Bill Hammond come to haunt us with their accusatory gazes. They stare at us from their steep cliffs as if they know something we do not yet understand. These half-human, half-bird creatures, elegant and unsettling with their bird heads perched on slender bodies, are the sentinels of a world we have already lost. They are the conscience of an aborted paradise, that of Aotearoa (the Maori name for New Zealand) before the arrival of humans, when birds reigned as absolute masters over this insular Eden.
Hammond was not just an artist, he was an archaeologist of collective memory, an excavator of contemporary anxieties. His painting is a relentless radiography of our environmental and colonial guilt. With a visual acuity that hurts, he shows us our own deformed reflection in the eyes of the creatures we have massacred or marginalized.
In his emblematic painting “Waiting for Buller” (1993), the bird-humans stand still, frozen in wait for their executioner, Walter Buller, that New Zealand ornithologist who meticulously documented birds while hunting them to extinction. Isn’t this a perfect metaphor for our current ecological schizophrenia? We study, we admire, we protect… and we destroy simultaneously. As the philosopher Michel Serres wrote in “Le Contrat Naturel”: “We love what we kill, we kill what we love” [1]. This destructive duality is at the very heart of Hammond’s work.
The visual singularity of Hammond lies in this constant tension between beauty and discomfort. His paintings are visually sumptuous, these emerald greens that seem to radiate from within, these golds that capture light like Byzantine icons, these daring compositions that defy all conventional perspective. But this visual splendor is only a trap set for our gaze. It attracts us to better confront us with the unsettling strangeness of these scenes.
The artist knew how to perfectly manipulate the codes of traditional painting to better subvert them. In “The Fall of Icarus” (1995), he reinterprets the classical theme of the fall of Icarus in a New Zealand landscape where bird-humans, impassive, observe the fall of this artificial winged intruder. The hybridity of his creatures echoes this fundamental ambivalence: we are neither completely separated from nature nor completely in harmony with it.
These bird-humans are not just fantastical figures from an artist’s unbridled imagination. They are the ghosts of a bygone past and the prophets of an uncertain future. They carry within them the memory of a time when New Zealand was “birdland,” as Hammond himself said after his transformative journey to the Auckland Islands in 1989. This experience of a place almost untouched by human presence was for him a revelation that would radically transform his work.
For there is indeed a before and after in Hammond’s artistic trajectory. His works from the 1980s, saturated with references to pop culture, rock music, and frenetic consumerism, testify to a very different sensibility. In “Animal Vegetable Acrylic” (1988), he presented us with a couple of yuppies in their designer interior, completely disconnected from each other and from the natural world visible through the window. The social critique was biting, the humor corrosive.
But even in these early works, we can already see the acerbic vision of an artist who refuses conventions, who distorts perspectives, who mixes scales and references. Hammond has always been an outsider in the New Zealand art world, refusing easy labels and comfortable affiliations. He was, as Justin Paton aptly noted, “the Jérôme Bosch of Lyttelton,” creating his own visual universe both familiar and profoundly strange.
The sociological dimension of Hammond’s work is unavoidable, especially in his paintings of birds. He dissects the complex relationships between Maori, European colonizers, and nature. As anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss explains in “La Pensée sauvage,” “animal species are not chosen because they are ‘good to eat’ but because they are ‘good to think with” [2]. And that is exactly what Hammond does with his birds: they are tools for thinking about our relationship with the world, with nature, with the other.
This visual thinking unfolds in works like “Bone Yard Open Home” (2009), a vast panorama where his winged creatures gather in immense volcanic caves. The reference to parietal art is evident, as if Hammond wanted to inscribe his vision in the long duration of humanity, in that primordial moment when man began to represent his environment. But unlike prehistoric cave paintings, which often celebrated hunting and human domination over animals, Hammond reverses the perspective: it is the birds who are the masters, the guardians of an ancestral knowledge that we have lost.
Certain late works, such as the “Wishbone Ash” series (2010-2011), introduce large decorated urns from which smoke escapes, evoking mysterious rituals, perhaps sacrifices. These ceremonial elements reinforce the mythological dimension of his work. Hammond does not just paint pictures, he creates a pantheon, a cosmogony, a personal mythology that dialogues with our contemporary myths of progress and domination.
The influence of Japanese printmaking and Chinese painting is palpable in his mature work. The fluid lines, the flattened perspectives, the daring compositions that break with Western perspective, all of this testifies to a deep affinity with Asian pictorial traditions. But Hammond is not an imitator; he absorbs these influences and transforms them in the service of his personal vision.
This vision is also nourished by literature. One cannot help but think of the writer J.G. Ballard when contemplating certain paintings by Hammond. In “The Crystal World,” Ballard describes a world where nature gradually crystallizes, freezing time and space in a fatal immobility. “The process seemed to have touched nodal points in time, the past and future crystallizing around them,” he writes [3]. This same sensation of suspended time, of the crystallization of a critical moment, inhabits Hammond’s paintings. His birds seem frozen in wait for a catastrophe that has already occurred.
Time, in Hammond, is not linear but cyclical or, better still, simultaneous. Past, present, and future coexist in the same pictorial space. The birds of “Traffic Cop Bay” (2003) inhabit a landscape that is both primordial and contemporary, as if the temporal strata had collapsed. This conception of time recalls what the writer J.G. Ballard described as “an eternal present where all actions are simultaneous” [4]. In this paradoxical temporality, the distinction between before and after colonization, between virgin nature and sullied nature, fades to give way to an acute awareness of the fragility of all equilibrium.
What strikes in Hammond’s work is also his ability to create a deep emotional resonance without resorting to pathos or easy moralism. He does not tell us what to think, he places us in front of a vision and leaves us free to react to it. It is precisely this ambiguity that makes his work strong. His paintings are mirrors that reflect our own gaze, our own questioning of our place in the world.
Hammond was a profoundly New Zealand artist, rooted in the specific history and geography of his country. But his work transcends this particular context to reach a universal dimension. For the questions he raises, our relationship with nature, the consequences of colonization, the loss of biodiversity, the violence of “civilization,” concern all of humanity.
He was also, let us not forget, a musician, a drummer. This is not insignificant. Rhythm, cadence, syncopation are present in his painting. His visual compositions have something musical in their balance between repetition and variation, between tension and resolution. Music, like painting, was for him a way to express the inexpressible, to give form to emotions and perceptions that escape rational language.
But Hammond was not a naive romantic who dreamed of an impossible return to an Edenic nature. His gaze was too lucid, too acerbic for that. He knew that we live in a world irremediably altered by human action. His paintings are not nostalgic calls for an idealized past, but meditations on our present condition, on what it means to be human in a world that we have transformed to the point of making it unrecognizable.
The ecological dimension of his work fits into what the philosopher Timothy Morton calls “dark ecology,” an ecological thought that renounces romantic fantasies to confront the disturbing reality of our entanglement with nature [5]. Hammond does not offer us an easy solution, no refuge in an idealized nature. He shows us instead an ambiguous, haunted world, where nature and culture, human and non-human, past and present are inextricably intertwined.
From this perspective, his paintings can be seen as monuments to the memory of a vanished world, but also as warnings, alarm signals. They remind us that other forms of life have preceded us on this earth and will probably survive us. The human is only an episode in the history of the planet, an episode that may remain brief if we persist in our blindness.
The genius of Hammond was to have been able to translate these philosophical and ecological considerations into images of unforgettable visual power. He does not theorize, he shows. And what he shows us is both magnificent and terrible, like the truth it contains.
So yes, you bunch of snobs, Bill Hammond was one of the great painters of our time, a visionary who knew how to create a personal mythology to express the anguish and beauty of our era. His bird-humans will long continue to observe us with their impenetrable eyes, silent witnesses to our passage on Earth.
- Serres, Michel. The Natural Contract. Éditions François Bourin, 1990.
- Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Savage Mind. Plon, 1962.
- Ballard, J.G. The Crystal World, 1966.
- Ballard, J.G. The Drowned World, 1962.
- Morton, Timothy. Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. Columbia University Press, 2016.
