Bill Hammond

Bill Hammond (29 August 1947 – 30 January 2021) was a New Zealand painter and printmaker born in Christchurch, who studied at the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts before committing to painting full-time in 1982. From 1987 until his death he lived and worked in Lyttelton, a harbour town that became inseparable from his practice and identity. Over the course of his career he developed one of the most distinctive visual languages in New Zealand art — a world populated by anthropomorphic birds, hybrid figures, and landscapes that hold colonial history at an unsettling angle.

Hammond's imagery draws on the deep entanglement between New Zealand's natural environment and the forces that transformed it. Waiting for Buller (1993), one of his best-known paintings, takes its title from Walter Lawry Buller, the nineteenth-century ornithologist, hunter, and taxidermist, and uses the figure of the bird to probe colonial science, the culture of collecting, and the contested relationship between settler culture and the natural world. Two years later he completed The Fall of Icarus (after Bruegel) (1995), an acrylic on recycled kauri held at Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū. The work invokes Bruegel's famous composition while redirecting its meanings toward colonisation and its consequences in New Zealand, and it is widely regarded as his most significant single painting.

Hammond's primary gallery relationship was with McLeavey Gallery in Wellington, where he held his first exhibition in 1987 and went on to present more than twenty solo shows — a sustained association that anchored his reputation nationally. His first solo exhibition had taken place at Brooke Gifford Gallery in Christchurch in 1982, and he later exhibited with PG Gallery 192 in Auckland, including the solo presentations Strap Buddy at the Bone Shop (2015) and Inveigle (2017). A 2026 solo exhibition, An Ideal Landscape, was held at McLeavey Gallery in Wellington. His work entered significant collections including Auckland Museum, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, the Chartwell Collection of Contemporary Art, the Fletcher Trust Collection, and the Jenny Gibbs Collection. In 1987 a Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council of New Zealand grant supported the construction of his Lyttelton studio, and in 1994 he received the Premier Award at the Visa Gold Art Award, sharing the honour with Luise Fong.