A LAND OF TWO HALVES
In A Land of Two Halves, Nick Wilkey reflects on the ways we divide, define and make sense of the landscape around us. He describes 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.
For more than two decades, Wilkey has travelled the same roads around Hawke’s Bay 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. To him, these are instructions written onto the ground, markers that have been there long enough for us to read them as landscape.
Wilkey's work invites us to look again at the familiar and question the lines, boundaries and stories we have come to accept as inherent to the land itself. The work asks what happens when we pause to consider these markers not simply as features of the landscape, but as evidence of the ways we have shaped, divided, and imagined it.
As my mind settles
In the folds of darkness,
My eyes attune to the horizon.
Limitless.
Boundless.
What we can see is all we see.
And so it must be.
These games we play,
These rules we make —
We made them for our own sake
And our making has not ceased.
The darkness is not empty.
It is unmeasured.
It is the whole beneath the ruling.
A land not ours to rule.
A land now measured.
Cut.
Spliced.
Separated.
Owned.
A Land Of Two Halves.
- Nick Wilkey