This large acrylic painting by Bill Hammond is named after Traffic Cop Bay, an area close to the artist's home in Lyttelton near Christchurch. Painted in 2003, Traffic Cop Bay features Hammond's characteristic 'birds' - elongated human figures with bird heads and wings. In an ambiguous space filled with unlikely objects and land masses, the bird figures perform various activities which are both familiar and utterly foreign. The artist as time-traveller In 1989 Hammond visited the Auckland Islands, located about 450 kilometres south of New Zealand as part of the Art in the Subantarctic project. He commented: 'You feel like a time-traveller, as if you have just stumbled upon it - primeval forests, ratas like Walt Disney would make. It's a beautiful place, but it's also full of ghosts, shipwrecks, death …' The visit marked a dramatic change in Hammond's art. His 1980s' preoccupation with rock music and domestic interiors was replaced by paintings of birds that stand as guardians of ecological history as well as ecological irresponsibility.
Print on archival paper - available professionally framed or unframed
