Over the last two decades Hipkins has worked primarily within photography and moving image, exploring landscape traditions and postcolonial theory; digital montage and discourses of hybridity; photo and filmic experimental narrative structures.

Early in his career, New Zealand artist Gavin Hipkins was described by fellow artist Giovanni Intra as a ‘tourist of photography’. This epithet has been used repeatedly by commentators on Hipkins’ work to describe two intertwined aspects of his practice. As art historian Peter Brunt puts it, Hipkins is a constantly travelling photographer, ‘an iconographer of desire, travel, time and … modern communities’, and a tourist within the medium, ‘a great manipulator of the photographic artifact itself’.

Hamish McKay Gallery, Wellington