Spanning five kauri panels, Bill Hammond’s A Lullaby of Birdland offers the viewer a surreal landscape that is populated by his idiosyncratic anthropomorphic avian forms and pitted with shadowy trees, picnic tables, cellos, a chaise lounge, a taxidermy kiwi and a grandfather clock. The painting stretches more than three metres and this physical scale transforms it into an ostensible environment that envelops the viewer and adds an element of credibility and verisimilitude to an otherwise other-worldly milieu.Five large bird-figures take centre stage in the work, performing music and reading, while the trees support a silent audience as clusters of smaller bird-forms perch in their branches. The apparent random selection of objects gives the work a surreal element, which is in turn heightened by the notable distance and disjuncture between the figures who do not acknowledge each other or the viewer. This physical space and separation combined with the interiority of the figures contributes to the overall calm serenity of the piece. Hammond’s use of a shifting horizon line suggests five seemingly individual views of ‘Birdland’ and, for the most part, each scene is indeed circumscribed by the parameters of the panel with only the last two being linked by a tree that spreads its branches across them. However, Hammond successfully manages to achieve a sense of cohesion through the use of recurrent elements such as the dribbling paint, the small fern fronds, the cellos and the bird forms. Colour also aids the unity of the work, which is dominated by sombre shades of blue, grey and black while three of the panels are further connected by the addition of searing red. On the last panel, a hybrid figure stands regally beside her cello. Demurely clothed in a floor-length, sweeping red dress, she appears either to have concluded a performance or to be about to commence one and is perhaps responsible for playing the lullaby to which Hammond evocatively alludes in the title of the painting. The sombre restricted palette enhances the meditative charm of the painting that is at once both poetically distant and instantly alluring. Thin rivulets of dark paint run gently down each of the five panels – painterly marks that are carried into the indeterminate background of the work, which is comprised of loose washes of thin paint. Indeed, these organic swathes of paint drift across the five panels like clouds of mist or light rain conjuring images of the New Zealand bush, which is similarly apparent in the presence of the trees, ferns, avian forms and the chromatic harmonies of blues and greys. This mysterious bush, however, is one that the spectator can observe but never enter. Completed in 1996, A Lullaby of Birdland featured as the major painting in Hammond’s show at Brooke Gifford Gallery in Christchurch. A smaller canvas painting from the same show entitled The Fall of Icarus was purchased by the Christchurch Art Gallery and remains in their permanent collection. The two works are both characterised by a pervasive tranquility and boast a number of similarities in terms of palette choice, painterly trickles and the absence of any sense of connection between the bird-figures and the outside world. Jemma Field