The Lost Lands Exhibition - Chris Wilkie - Wellington Gallery

 The artist originally intended to title these works:

 Wherever I go,
 I look for kakapo.

 -simple rhymes, to allude to the empty landscapes he encountered in Fiordland over the last 4 years. And in many ways his linked oils are poetic, with small and large grids he calls Sadness Devices gently showing the painter dreaming of things rapidly slipping into death and memory. Later, a poem sent to him of e.e. Cummings, struck a note of poignancy:

Then shall I turn my face, and hear from one bird
sing terribly afar in the lost lands.

Other big diptychs show primordial landscapes, but with the hint of species drifting away into the soft light. All of the works have a bird reference, sometimes overtly, but more often hidden, such as a scrawled Eagle from the epoch of Maori rock art, or the ghost of a Takahe’s plumage floating over the images like a mirage.

This cycle of paintings continues Wilkie’s reflections on historic themes, from the seminal Hone Heke Cycle of 2003-4, through the powerful exhibition  Ruapekapeka, after the storm” 2005, and more topically the For the Birds and Radiance and Remorse,  show at Kura in 2008.

The artist considers these works necessary, and that they are a cry from our lost lands for diminutive things rapidly disappearing.

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