Published by Bouncy Castle and City Gallery Wellington (2020) with generous support from Pollen Contemporary Art Foundation.

The Homely II documents an epic photographic project by artist and filmmaker Gavin Hipkins.

The colonists arrived with their pianos and their bible, ready to transform wild new Zealand into an idea of idyllic, pastoral England - to make it home. Here, they would perfect a conflicted sense of ‘home’. It would be where they hailed from and where they now had their heads - their home away from home. Both would become equally homely and unhomely. Pakeha artist Gavin Hipkins explores this colonial condition and arts legacy in, The Homely II (2001-17). This epic frieze of eighty photos, taken on touristic excursions in New Zealand and the United kingdom scrambles here and there.  

The volume features an interview with the artist and writing by Felicity Barnes, Andrew Clifford, Blair French, Terence Hanscombe, Robert Leonard, Aaron Lister, Emil McAvoy, Emma Ng, Lara Strongman and Megan Tamati-Quennell.

What the reviewers say…

For me, Gavin Hipkins’ book The Homely II, is all about being ‘out of place’. Hipkins poetically questions our sense of belonging, asking: what does ‘home’ mean for you? While not offering any straightforward answers to this question, the enigmatic sequence of photographs provides us with an unnerving, dreamlike and fragmented narrative: murky signposts towards a complex and unsettling notion of ‘home’.

The Homely II prompts the viewer to navigate through their own understanding of place, belongIng and nationhood. It hints at the conflicted histories that have led to this, and also prompts us to examine our own complicities in the notion of colonial ‘home’ building and its repercussions. Being a Pakeha New Zealander myself, perhaps I always felt this way - a mixed up sense of simultaneously belonging and not belonging to this place I call ‘home’.
—Harry Culy in Photoforum NZ.

Gavin Hipkins was born in Auckland Tamaki Makaurau in 1968. Over the past three decades he has developed a practice in photography and moving image that frequently returns to the intersections of modernism and the post/colonial nation-state by repurposing image and and texts. His work addresses the histories of his chosen media as well as the ways in which images have shaped the contemporary world as transmitted and visual manifestations of ideology. He has exhibited extensively both internationally and in Aotearoa. Hipkins represented New Zealand in the 2018 Asia Pacific Triennial, the 2002 Sao Paulo Biennale and the 1998 Biennale of Sydney. In 2006 he undertook a residency at the ISCP in New York and in 1998 he was selected as the inaugural New Zealand resident at Artspace Sydney. Hipkin’s first feature film Erewhon - based on Samuel Butler’s 1872 novel Erewhon, Or Over the Range - premiered in 2014 at the New Zealand International Film Festival and Edinburgh Festival.