Christine Hellyar

Christine Joy Hellyar was born in New Plymouth in 1947 and raised in Taranaki. The beaches and bush of the region stayed in her work for decades. Her love of museums began with childhood visits, alongside her father, to Fred Butler's home museum in New Plymouth. The artist Don Driver, also from New Plymouth, became a lifelong friend and mentor, and the art historian Michael Dunn later saw Driver's influence, along with pop art, in her work.

In the 1960s she moved to Auckland to study sculpture at the Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland. She was taught by Greer Twiss, befriended Molly Macalister, and was influenced by Louise Bourgeois and Robert Smithson. Encouraged to experiment with rubber latex, she used it to cast leaves, pine cones and other natural forms. Her 1969 dissertation was titled Landscape Sculpture, and she graduated with a Diploma in Fine Arts with honours in 1970. The cast metal work Aluminium skin (1968), made while she was a student, is now in Te Papa's collection.

Country Clothesline (1972), one of her first major works, is made of 22 items of clothing dipped in latex and hung along a rope propped up with a pole, with no fixed order for hanging. It is held by the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery. Bush Situation (1976) built an environment of floor pieces and hanging latex casts of vegetation, often stitched with copper wire. Some viewers found the rubbery smell and texture unsettling, a reminder, as Priscilla Pitts wrote, that this was art and not nature.

Hellyar travelled the South Island in 1970, spent 1974 living mainly in Fowey, Cornwall, and lived in Edinburgh from 1977 until the end of 1978, visiting Egypt and crossing the United States on her way home. Seeing how European museums collected and displayed objects as artefacts led to her Thought Cabinets of the early 1980s, which arranged bones, food and made objects in cabinets, cupboards and trays to explore the evolution of human thought and the hunter and gatherer within modern life.

In 1982 she filled a gallery at the Auckland City Art Gallery with Shelter, structures of muslin, flax and twigs that resembled traps, lairs or shelters, inhabited by small creatures of fur, claws, shells and bark. For the 1982 Biennale of Sydney she made Meat Cupboard, Dagger Cupboard and Cloak Cupboard, glass-fronted cabinets whose shelves moved from Realism at the top through Abstraction and Found Objects to a final shelf that combined all three.

Hellyar lectured at the Gippsland Institute of Higher Education in 1980 and taught at Elam from 1981 to 1996, rising to senior lecturer. Anne Kirker wrote in 1986 that she had earned a reputation as a teacher and was one of the few women employed at either of New Zealand's two university art schools. She left in 1996 to work full time in her studio, and received the first Adam Award for her contribution to New Zealand art, which funded her first large outdoor bronzes.

Her Pacific Food Aprons of the mid 1980s sewed latex casts of vegetables and meat onto fabric aprons. Being Born, Bearing Fruit and Dying (1986) led viewers through birth, reproduction and death with clay, latex, bronze, lead and iron forms. For Expo 92 in Seville she made Fluttering and settling, nearly 140 earthenware leaves and worm-like creatures, writing that the earth is a body and that plants of all kinds are its hair and skin. Te Papa showed the work again in 2023 in Te Mata Turoa o Papa This Natural World.

In the 1990s she made large, delicate bronzes cast from plants and flowers. Armlet (1993), commissioned for the University of Auckland, features nikau fronds, harakeke, toetoe and silver fern cast in bronze. As a member of Outdoor Sculpture 2001, which installed eight permanent sculptures in the Auckland Domain to mark the millennium, she made Spring (2004), a bronze and basalt work. She won the McConnell Properties Stoneleigh Sculpture Award in 2009.

From 2002 she explored the Enlightenment in the Pacific, starting with Mrs Cook's Kete with Maureen Lander at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. She held a Department of Conservation residency on Mount Taranaki in 2003, the Tylee Cottage residency at Whanganui's Sarjeant Gallery in 2005, and was resident botanic artist at the Auckland Botanic Gardens. Her Red cloud, dozens of blood-red handkerchiefs and napkins, appeared in Tell Tails at the National Library in 2015, and Looking, Seeing, Thinking followed at Te Uru in 2017.

Christine Hellyar died peacefully in Auckland on 5 October 2026, aged 79, after a long illness. Her funeral was held at St Michael's Catholic Church, Remuera, on 9 October 2026, with donations invited to Mercy Hospice. Te Papa farewelled her on 30 October 2026, saying her sculptures, installations, drawings and artist books remain endlessly beguiling and provoking. Her work is held in most New Zealand public collections.