Christine Hellyar 1947–2026

It is with sadness that we farewell New Zealand artist and sculptor Christine Hellyar.

Born in New Plymouth in 1947, Christine spent her childhood in Taranaki before moving to Auckland in the 1960s to study at the Elam School of Art. There she began working as a sculptor, initially experimenting with casting, including casting in latex. The cast metal work Aluminium skin was made while she was a student.

From the 1960s onwards, Christine’s practice was shaped by a deep fascination with materials, process and found objects. Her sculptures were often connected to the human body, and they frequently explored the relationships between people and the natural environment. In one of her major early works, Country Clothesline (1972, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery collection), twenty-two items of clothing were dipped in latex and hung on a rope propped up with a wooden pole. The sculpture’s stiff latex clothes evoke the weather and the landscape, but also the body, and the rhythms of domestic work.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Christine produced a series of works in which made and found objects were gathered in cabinets, cupboards, boxes or jars. These objects were often ordered by type, arranged into categories. At the same time, they slip their seemingly scientific order – endlessly disrupted by the domestic furniture that houses them, by the translation involved in processes like casting, and by the material invitation to touch and imagine, rather than just look and record. The objects in these collections speak to forms of knowledge that sit outside the bounds of science or museum classification, breaking down hierarchies of thought, and connecting Christine’s practice with that of other contemporary feminists.

In 1992, Christine’s ceramic installation Fluttering and settling was part of a large exhibition of ceramics and glass titled Treasures of the Underworld, the New Zealand entry for the 1992 Expo, in Seville. Just how closely she saw her relationship with the earth is revealed in the catalogue, where she wrote, ‘I suppose I am an earth person, and a body person. The earth is the body, and I am part of that body’. She continued:

For years my work has embraced a broad theme that the earth is a body, that plants of all kinds are its hair and skin. Sending my plants to other cultures is a process akin to skin grafting. All of the forms in this installation are flowers. They are also from plants that are/ were useful to the Māori and European settlers. They represent the nikau and kiekie vegetation and the winged and worm-like creatures of the forest. Along with New Zealand native plants that are now flourishing in Northern Hemisphere gardens, I hope my installation becomes part of the Southern Hemisphere cloak of warming and protection.

For this work, Christine moulded almost one hundred and forty earthenware leaves and worm-like creatures. From the photographs, you can see their delicacy and the power of the wind.

In 2023, Fluttering and settling was shown at Te Papa, as part of the exhibition Te Mata Tūroa o Papa This Natural World. When showing this fragile and beautiful work, we thought about the way these ideas flowed into the other adornment, film and art on display, all of which highlighted the forms and rhythms of the natural world.

Christine Hellyar practised as an artist for over 50 years, and in that time, she produced a remarkable body of work. Her sculptures, installations, drawings, and artist books remain endlessly beguiling and provoking – in their forms and materials, but also as prompts to a different way of looking at and thinking about the world. Te Papa is lucky to hold numerous examples of Christine’s work, a tribute to her place in New Zealand’s art history.

We send our aroha to Christine’s family and friends.

View more works by Christine Hellyar on Collections online.