All Along the Heaphy Highway immediately summons up scenarios we think we know well – classic set pieces from films, Renaissance paintings and theatre – but, the more we study this grandly compelling painting, the more odd and unsettling it becomes. The painting’s highly charged atmosphere suggests the classic tension of an ambush about to happen at the same time as it relays the bustling and preening of a royal court, settling itself in, ready to conduct the weighty business of state as the world looks on. Think of von Tempsky and William Strutt’s ambush paintings of the New Zealand Wars, and then think of Mantegna’s frescoes of the Gonzaga family and retinue.
The lofty vantage point of the gathered bird people on the right-hand side of the painting indicates supreme tactical advantage, as any travelers on the road below are seen and anticipated with predatory delight a long time before they actually reach the shadowed grove, through which they must pass. The way the poses of the watchers move between high seriousness and comic exaggeration, puts me in mind of the TV advertisement in which a manic group of giggling, sneering possums kidnaps a car from hapless youths hypnotised by a boxed pizza glowing on the roadway like a piece of alien technology. The TV ad plays on all the sci-fi and horror films we have seen about nocturnal abductions in forests and encountering the uncanny and insane inhabitants of lost highways. Hammond has done a great deal to seek out and populate the dark forest of myth in the New Zealand psyche. One easily thinks of: the shaggy medieval forests of Altdorfer; the archaic English and damp Northern European forests that Tolkien recreated in Mirkwood and Fangorn as homes of goblins, orcs, elves and ents; Shakespeare’s woods in which magical transformations of appearance and identity frequently occur; or the cruel magic of Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood in which the fears and desires of the collective unconscious are projected as real phantoms.
It is not hard to understand why Peter Jackson has said that Bill Hammond is his favourite New Zealand artist. And how wrong Hammond has shown the 1940s’ critic A R D Fairburn to be in his declaration that, “there is no golden mist in the air, no Merlin in our woods”. For starters, what did Fairburn think had happened to the spirit inhabitants of the woods about which Maori mythology told stories? Hammond’s populous spirit world is, on one level, an indirect acknowledgement of the uncanny return of this repressed mythology. In the early part of the 20th century, the Arts and Crafts architect Chapman-Taylor made a number of cutely romantic photographs of gauzily clad nymphets prancing amongst the ferns and kauris, in a deliberate attempt to graft an English, Arthurian and Elven fantasy onto the local bush. Another confused but telling attempt to depict the invisible mythic world close at hand can be seen in Trevor Lloyd’s surreal 1925 painting Death of a Moa. Lloyd’s gathering of gossipy birds is spied on by supposedly Maori wood sprites, the patupaiarehe. Less overtly mythical is a strange 1886 painting by Kennett Watkins, The Home of the Cormorants, Waitakere Ranges, in which pied cormorants perch silently on a network of spindly branches. Chapman-Taylor and Lloyd’s sylvan fantasies, and Watkins’ eerie image are all quirky ancestors of Hammond’s uncanny avian communities.
The cleverly handled sense of big-scale drama in All Along the Heaphy Highway provides an understructure for a medley of exquisite colouristic and calligraphic effects which ripple across the work. Hammond is very able to match the intricate and delicate to the coarse and sketchy. The birds in the light are tattooed with musical notations, city high-rises, cars and copperplate script inventories of land surveys and sales. In the dark mesh of detail on the left-hand side of the image, bird, horse and ghoul figures appear and fade away amidst a sticky tracery of branches, foliage and dripping paint. Small flecks of dark pigment and ambiguous brush marks float on a saturated emerald ground, sometimes morphing into bodies or sprays of leaves, or just remaining as suggestive stains. ALLAN SMITH