Event Details
Sep 8
Muse Art Gallery
In A Land of Two Halves, Nick Wilkey reflects on the ways we divide, define and make sense of the landscape around us. He explains the title as referring to “the two halves of a match, two halves of a country. Land that was whole and then got divided, the division was only ever a story we told, well enough that it stuck.”
Wilkey has travelled the same roads around Hawke’s Bay for more than two decades and over time, began to notice the rules written into the landscape: fence lines, shelter belts, power poles, and even a set of goalposts standing in a paddock miles from the nearest club. According to Wilkey, they’re instructions written onto the ground and have been there long enough that we read them as landscape.
Everything ruled in these paintings is drawn in something impermanent; sports lines, tallies, survey notations. Chalk belongs to the ledger, the classroom, and the sideline – three places a country teaches itself what it thinks it owns.
A Land of Two Halves invites us to look again at the familiar and to question the lines, boundaries and stories we have come to accept as inherent to the land itself. Wilkey’s work asks what happens when we pause to consider these markers not simply as part of the landscape, but as evidence of the ways we have shaped, divided and imagined it.