Bill Hammond has set many of his ‘bird’ paintings in imaginary gang hide-outs in the deep forest. By so doing he stirs both fresh and archaic memories of fugitives and outlaw bands going bush or holding court somewhere in the ‘badlands’. Whether we think of the Vietcong and their complex guerilla subterfuges made possible through intimate knowledge of a dense jungle landscape, or Robin Hood in his mythical Sherwood forest robbing the unjustly rich, or alleged paramilitary training camps in the heart of the misty Ureweras being raided by New Zealand police, we all have plenty of real and fantastic imagery that is brought to life by Hammond’s gangland scenarios. One of the things that Hammond seems to be tapping into with such evocative titling, is the extraordinary degree of formality and theatricalised hierarchy that seems to come with much gang life in fact and fiction; this is all part of gang lore and mythology that grows around the idea of a group developing complex group relations and rankings that mimic, while rejecting, the society they hide from or hide inside.

As is now well known, Hammond’s secret societies of waiting bird-men are part of his ongoing series begun with his paintings of ‘Bullers Birds'. These avian watchers are somehow frozen in an endless time of waiting for that most perfect of dishes, revenge served cold, that is, some slow and thorough justice meted out on Buller the ‘bird-stuffer’, as scapegoat for any and every colonial and ecological crime visited on this country in its haunted past. Hammond’s bird-men pose, stretch, hang and confer in their haughty elevation like proud members of some feared and sinister elite. Time is on their side.

As with many paintings from this series, the jungle mystique is bodied forth in strange deep greens, blues and turquoises. In some works, mist and tropical rain falls in sheets across the tangles and filigrees of ornate foliage. The richly strange patterning of the foliage imprints itself like second skins on the bodies of the birds, the branches and torsos of the trees. Huge ferns rise like ancient sentinels in a world far above the forest floor. In his novel The Drowned World, J G Ballard writes of damp, rotting and terrifying jungles that seem part dream, part violent return of a savage past. Ballard could be describing a composite Hammond painting in some passages:

In the early morning light a strange mournful beauty hung over the lagoon; the somber green-black fronds of the gymnosperms, intruders from the Triassic past, and the half-submerged white-faced buildings of the 20th century still reflected together in the dark mirror of the water, the two interlocking worlds apparently suspended at some junction in time, … twenty miles away the horizon was still obscured by the early morning mists, huge palls of golden vapour that hung from the sky like diaphanous curtains … the green spires of the great horsetails and fern-trees reached a hundred feet into the air … ahead of him he could hear the bats screech and dive among the dark trunks in the endless twilight world of the forest floor.
Allan Smith