![]() ![]() ![]() A strange green 'rain' falls into the scene as the stronger birds, painted in uneasy anthropomorphic forms, watch silently. The world is a primitive zone, an eery green space where volcanic cones errupt onto a barren land and into a lifeless sea. Icarus, the young man in Greek mythology who flew too close to the sun with this feather and wax wings, is seen plunging headfirst into the earth watched by the still and silent birds. This threat to New Zealand wildlife is the theme explored in The Fall of Icarus. His lavishly illustrated volumes on New Zealand birds document many species that have not survived into the twentieth century and others that may not survive into the next. The following year in response to this trip he completed a series of works which illustrated his reawakened interest in the land, in New Zealand bird life and in the nineteenth century ornithologist Sir Walter Buller. In 1989 Bill Hammond joined a number of other New Zealand artists on an expedition to Antarctica and the Auckland Islands. Hammond has won a number of awards and fellowships and is represented in private and public collections throughout New Zealand. He held his first solo exhibition in 1979 and has since exhibited regularly. For a period after leaving art school he designed and manufactured wooden toys. ![]() Hammond was born in Christchurch and studied at the University of Canterbury. Hammond has developed this work from a 1558 painting by the Dutch artist Pieter Brueghel (active 1551-1569). The threat posed to the natural environment through use by humans is suggested by Hammond using the Greek legend of Icarus, who flew too close to the sun, melting his wax and feather wings and plunging to his death in the sea. Sleek and enigmatic, wearing lustrous fabrics rather than feathers, they suggest New Zealand's early history as a land occupied almost solely by birds, before the arrival of humans. In a green, almost primordial, world of dripping forests and smouldering volcanoes, bird-like creatures stand as sentinels, looking out to sea. In 1989 he joined a number of other New Zealand artists on an expedition to Antarctica and the Auckland Islands.’Bill Hammond: Jingle Jangle Morning’ (2007) is the most recent survey of Hammond’s work to date, organised by Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū. Hammond was born in Christchurch and studied at the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts between 19. The same compositional format – elevated viewpoint, figures in the foreground and the tiny body of the fallen Icarus disappearing into the sea – are seen in the original painting. The Fall of Icarus takes a work by Dutch artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c.1558) as a pivotal reference. Hammond’s birds look on dispassionately, their own wings emphasising the absurdity of Icarus’s fatal desire. Bill Hammond uses this legend to suggest the threat posed to the natural environment by humans. In Greek mythology, Icarus flew too close to the sun, melting the wax that bound his wings and causing him to plunge into the sea. Some hold on to branches, needing that reassuring grasp lest they fall off their perch, while others are ghostlike, stretched out in crucifix poses, as if they, too, are about to fall into the abyss of extinction. Bill had nineteenth-century bird stuffers like Walter Buller in mind when he painted these birds. Here, they occupy a primordial time before human habitation. These birds have been a motif for Bill since the early 1990s, representing the colonised and colonisers of Aotearoa New Zealand. Bill Hammond: Playing the Drums, 3 August 2019 – 19 January 2020īill’s take on Bruegel’s sixteenth-century masterpiece Landscape with the Fall of Icarus is populated with serious, enigmatic bird creatures watching from their treetop perches as one of their own takes wing and fails to fly, crashing centre stage. ![]()
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