During his exhibition, in the gallery, artist Hamish Macaulay joined gallery director Vincent Eames for a conversation around Distant Shores—sharing the memories, materials and changing light that shape this latest body of work.
For those who could not join us, here are some highlights from the afternoon.
Landscapes shaped by memory
Although Hamish’s work is deeply connected to Aotearoa: New Zealand, these are not strictly depictions of particular places. He described the landscapes as “generally imagined scenes that are informed by places that I’ve been to or seen”.
“They’re not site-specific,” he explained. “They may have remnants or portions that have been garnered from a specific memory… Often they’re amalgamations.”
After fifteen years in London, returning to New Zealand brought a new environment, colours and light into his work. Across the four exhibitions we have presented together—Flood, Changing Light, Seasons and now Distant Shores—Hamish sees a clear evolution.
“There’s a lot more confidence, especially in this show,” he said. “I feel more confident with the mark-making that I’m doing, and with the landscapes that I’m generating.”
He now considers himself “an artist from Aotearoa” rather than a UK artist. Yet the landscapes remain open enough for each viewer to bring their own associations. A distant shore might be New Zealand, Scotland, or somewhere different altogether held in personal memory.
“I create things that I want people to be drawn to,” Hamish said, “almost like a window - looking into a scene that they would like to be at, or something that they can resonate with.”
Returning to the same view
A question from the room steered the conversation to the recurring vocabulary of Hamish’s work: horizon, headland, water, weather and sky. Why stay with these elements over such a sustained period?
In fact, their familiarity is what makes the work so alive. Hamish does not need a wholly new subject each time; by returning to the same essential landscape, he is able to attend more closely to difference.
This is, in many ways, what seasons do. The physical landscape remains broadly stable, while colour, vegetation, temperature, weather, the length of the day and the quality of the light continually alter how we experience it.
If every picture began with an entirely different subject, we might notice the subject first. By holding the motif relatively constant, Hamish makes us more sensitive to subtler shifts: in colour, atmosphere, surface, light and mood. The repetition is not a limitation, but a means of seeing more.
Capturing a fleeting light
The extraordinary, fast-changing light of New Zealand’s coast is central to the exhibition. Hamish spoke of how quickly a scene can alter—the kind of moment that disappears before it can be photographed.
“Everyone’s familiar with the golden hour,” he said. “It should be golden five minutes, because that’s all you’ve got.”
The colours in the works can seem heightened or surreal, but they emerge from things Hamish has actually seen. “While some of these might seem surreal to people in the UK,” he told us, “they actually are real… they’re based on what I would see every day in some form or other.”
The work is less about recording a view than preserving the sensation of a fleeting one: the sudden glow of a sky, the shimmer of water, or the stillness that can follow wild weather.
Layers, risk and revelation
Many of the works in Distant Shores are unique monotypes made using a gel plate. Hamish paints the image onto the plate in reverse, building up layers before transferring the whole image to paper in a single pull.
“What’s at the front is painted onto the plate first,” he explained. “Then I’m painting in reverse.”
A work might contain twenty or thirty layers, each allowed to dry before the next is added. The final layer and paper are then placed on top and left under weights overnight. Only the next morning does Hamish discover the result.
“It’s the first time I see it,” he said. “You peel the plate away, and there’s my print—in an ideal world.”
That element of uncertainty is integral to the process. “Every other print technique where you peel the paper away, there’s that moment of either utter brilliance or complete disaster.”
No two prints can be the same. Even when several works begin from a similar idea or palette, the transfer creates its own variations. In Hamish’s words, “they’re brothers or sisters”—related, but never identical.
Making by hand
Before becoming a full-time artist, Hamish spent around twenty-five years working in graphic design and advertising. As that world became increasingly digital, printmaking offered a necessary return to physical materials and hand-made marks.
“For those of us who yearned for mark-making by hand, I think that’s how I got into printmaking,” he reflected. After long days at the agency, the studio became “therapy”: “getting filthy, ink under the nails… creating something completely from scratch, from memory, by hand.”
His background in design remains present in the work, particularly in its balance, composition and confident use of colour. “It’s also about colour theory,” he said. “In design school, we learn the basics from composition to colour theory… I think that’s significant.”
Looking outward, looking home
The title Distant Shores captures an idea of longing: looking out from home, looking back towards it, and imagining elsewhere.
“There’s always longing,” Hamish said. “Perhaps we do it in our mind.”
His work offers a space for just that. Whether we recognise a New Zealand coastline, a Scottish horizon or a place entirely our own, these works invite us to pause, look, and travel through memory.
The metallic elements and layered surfaces are especially difficult to photograph, so we hope you will come and experience Distant Shores in person while it’s still on at the Gallery, or see more of Hamish’s work at the Eames Collectors’ Studio.
Distant Shores is on until Sunday 6 September at Eames Fine Art Gallery. Other works by Hamish Macaulay can always be viewed at the Eames Fine Art Studio.
The works can also be viewed online here.
