Bill Hammond—Essay by Megan Shaw

ArticleArt

25 Mar

Bill Hammond’s Wishbone Ash Stash 2, Cornwall Road (2011) is a commanding work from one of the artist’s final major series, Wishbone Ash (2010–11). It is refined, confident and deeply symbolic.

Lot 58. Bill Hammond, *Wishbone Ash Stash 2, Cornwall Road,* 2011, acrylic on canvas, 855 x 1040mm.
EST. $360,000—$500,000

The painting is a triumph of modern Aotearoa New Zealand art, balancing visual elegance with the artist’s long-standing interest in mortality, memory and transformation. Its surface is cool and poised, echoing the elongated grace of its avian figures, even as it engages with themes that feel weighty, ancient and ritualised. We take a deep breath before entering the smoke.

Named after the English rock band Wishbone Ash, this series riffs on the domestic ritual of pulling a wishbone from a Sunday-roast bird. Traditionally, the wishbone fracture determines who receives a ‘wish’, a small gesture of luck or future promise. Hammond subverts this superstition. Birds wield small hand-held burners, reducing the bones to ash, transforming the wishbones into smoke. The rising trails of vapour are like incense, suggesting purification rites or funerary rituals rather than childhood games or mealtime sociability.

Hammond’s bird people, central to his practice since the early 1990s, are neither wholly human nor wholly avian. They occupy a liminal space as guardians, mourners, musicians or witnesses; roles that shift subtly between works. They are also witnesses to environmental loss in Aotearoa. Following Hammond’s pivotal journey to the subantarctic Auckland Islands, his figures began to hold themselves like museum specimens: elongated, still, and suspended between life and display.

Highlights of Previous Sales at Webb’s

Bill Hammond, *Clutch 2*
Sold, Price Realised incl. BP:$110,537.50

Bill Hammond, *Wishbone Ash*
Sold, Price Realised incl. BP:$113,525

The figures’ specimen-like restraint and the clinical precision of their actions recall an era when living birds were translated into skins, diagrams and Victorian curiosity cabinets. The burning of bones becomes an elegy for what has vanished under the pressures of habitat destruction, introduced predators and extractive colonial histories.

Hammond often situates his narratives outside linear chronology. Here, the twilight palette and ambiguous spatial field create a world both before and after rupture. Within this temporal ambiguity, the subversion of the wishbone ritual — a domestic custom imported through settler culture — gains force. Instead of splitting the bone to secure a future, the birds incinerate it. The gesture suggests the costs embedded in certain kinds of wishing: ideas of progress, possession or dominion that have reshaped land and life in Aotearoa.

“This is a painting to listen to as much as to look at. Hammond worked with music playing in his studio, and his paintings are infused with musical references, riddles, lyrics, and the combined spirit of a 1980s rocker and an elegant classical musician.”

Ultimately, the work stands as a late-career distillation: contemplative but unsentimental, earthly yet otherworldly. In transforming the humble wishbone into a site of ritual and release, Hammond offers an elegy, a performance, and a quiet meditation on what remains after the flame.