Gavin Hipkins

Gavin John Hipkins (born 1968 in Auckland) is a New Zealand photographer and film-maker, and Associate Professor at Elam School of Fine Arts, at the University of Auckland.

Hipkins completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland in 1992 and a Master of Fine Arts at the University of British Columbia in 2002.

Throughout his career, Hipkins has worked with both analogue and digital forms of photography. His work is often produced as either discrete multi-part works or, more rarely, in ongoing series.

Falls (1992-)

Hipkins began working with the format he used for a number of works, collectively known as Falls, while he was still at art school. These works are made up of 'vertical strip[s] of machine prints, which present the content of a single roll of film—a session of almost identical shots of one subject from more or less the same angle, like a ‘shot’ of film footage'.Zerfall Wellington 1 March 1996 (1996) is made up of images from a firework display. Falls, Zerfall (1997–1998), shown at the 1998 Biennale of Sydney, consisted of images of circular objects usually found in kitchens and bathrooms. A set of seven Falls, titled The Gulf, mixed images collected from pornography websites (each work was titled after a genre: Teen, Blonde, Mature, Asian, Latina, Ebony, and Red-headed) mixed with stereotypical imagery from travel advertising, photos of small accessories (buttons, ribbon) and neutral background textures.

Westwards (1993)

In this series, Hipkins used ready-made images, sourced from kitschy offset prints made in Switzerland in 1978, which he bought in West Auckland. He reproduced the images as large rectangular wallpaper murals (2160 x 4800 mm each).

New Age (1993-2003)

The New Age works are closely linked to the photographs in the The Sanctuary series. Photographs of New Zealand's West Coast and other personally significant landscapes are overlaid with photograms of beads. The original photographs are sourced from Hipkins' own archive, using existing works that have rarely been printed.

The Field (1994-1995)

In The Field 1,500 photograms produced by placing a polystyrene ball on a sheet of photographic paper and exposing it to light. The photograms were shown as a single massed grid on the gallery wall. The work was shown at Teststrip, an artist-run gallery in Auckland, and at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery.

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