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In an ode to the hills, seas and skies of Aotearoa, Ruby Wilkinson’s series Belle Plaine is filled with an encompassing softness and yearning.
Intersecting scenes of reality and utopian fantasy, Wilkinson’s atmospheric planes allow us to meditate on the natural world at its most dizzying beauty, envisioned through soft brushstrokes and soothing ochres, blues and pinks. Shapes of birds, moths and bodies connect the landscapes to the earth, like how a sailor sees a bird, and knows land is nearby.
Belle Plaine was inspired from an encounter Wilkinson had with a cargo ship of the same name whilst fishing at Marsden Point with her father. Using marinetraffic.com, she tracked its journey from Whangārei to eastern China, conjuring the seascapes and skies it would cross on the way to its destination. Painted during a transitional period as she prepared to move to Naarm (Melbourne), the landscapes are thick with a sort of preemptive nostalgia. The intense, almost fluorescent pinks and baby blues reflect the twilight sky at its dazzling climax, taken from her commute home from her Onehunga studio through Hillsborough Road towards the West Auckland horizon.
Wilkinson’s paintings now sit nestled within the Viaduct Harbour. The surrounding docks greet the pedestrian with an endless array of pleasure vessels, with waxed fibreglass and tinted windows. Names like Templar, Succession, Wild Berry and Nirvana stand out in varying sans-serif fonts, seemingly in dialogue with Belle Plaine. Ports and twilight are transitional zones—land and sea, night and day; the borders between these worlds are opaque. Belle Plaine, the ship, straddles these spaces, acting as both conduit and protagonist to the narrative threads within the works. Although the ship is notably absent from the paintings, its symbolic presence allows us to formulate our own position as a viewer in Wilkinson’s world. She creates wayfinding points within the figures dotting her paintings, guides that allow her to find her way back home.
Limbo addresses this subtly. Limbo is defined as a boundary, a state of uncertainty, or theologically, a waiting room between heaven and hell. The painting depicts four moths floating above a gentle sun, cut in half by an opalescent body of blue brushstrokes, glimmers of pink reflected from the red sky above. The scene feels familiar, but crescents spring out from the central sun, like alien moons on a faraway planet. The moths blend into each other, seemingly moving in unison towards the light of the sun. The symbol of the sun is present in most paintings, changing in size and force, functioning in the same way a sundial might track the varying shadow lengths as a vessel moves through latitudes.
The night before Cyclone Vaianu hit our shores, the sky in Tāmaki Makaurau was a deep red, the clouds in geometric rows across the sky. I thought of Wilkinson’s paintings then, as I witnessed the sun dip below the horizon, and the sky fade to a cool blue, and the grid of clouds faded into the night.
The landscape, light and horizon have been points of reference for artists in Aotearoa. In Gretchen Albrecht’s Eight Hours, she examines this through the liturgy of the hours, and the ancient Greek interpretation of time, hora, which measured time passing by the way light appears and recedes, the temperature of air and water, birth and death¹. Fragments of Albrecht’s approach to time and land appear in Wilkinson’s paintings, as she explores the ephemeral quality of our landscape at twilight. The sky at twilight changes by the minute; Wilkinson reinterprets the receding light at different intervals, deconstructing the beauty of the sunset.
There is a sense of transcendence present in the paintings, scenes which bring the viewer into a gentle, reflective space. In conversation, I asked Wilkinson if she had a spiritual practice. She replied: “I have always been quite superstitious, I believe in coincidences and serendipity as a way for the world to communicate. My dad asked me recently what god looks like, and I answered with coincidences.” I don’t completely agree with this statement, but I like thinking about it. In Knelt and Post, two figures are depicted kneeling from different angles, one from the side, and one from the back. The rest of the body is absent. The figures are sat before the landscape in a state of surrender, or meditation.
The figure of the moth is transformed throughout the paintings, appearing in different forms and varying states of deconstruction. In Marita, the moth becomes a series of minimal lines, two circles make up wings, the paint slightly bleeding into the background. A long white cloud floats behind her, like a halo. Martha is earthen and chthonic, outlined by thick brushstrokes, camouflaged within the deep brown of the canvas. Margaret is watery and elusive, fading out into the deep blue below her. Bird sightings at dusk and dawn are used by sailors as proximity indicators to land. Perhaps a moth functions in a similar way, through its own form of celestial navigation, and symbolic association as a messenger. Their presence in the foreground of these obliterating landscapes seems to anchor these scenes back to the earth; a point to look back to if you are lost in the landscape.
Abstraction has been interpreted as a way to envision an idealistic utopian society, painters rejecting notions of imperfect realities in an attempt to create worlds of visionary ideal². Instead of a Bauhausian geometric utopianism, Wilkinson’s responses to the land are rooted in her experiences and emotions, which are then translated into these euphoric scenes. Through her interpretation, she is able to experience and depict a present which has a subtly different feeling: it is a mediated “now”³, an amplified version of reality. Actively seeking and creating beauty can sometimes feel like an act of rebellion. Wilkinson’s utopia is casting off on a boat gently rocking in the Manukau Harbour.
I’m reminded of my own road trips through the country, staring out of the window. Languid rural landscapes rushing past me, the ocean slowly revealing itself across an expanse of empty highway. I often have my phone out, zoomed in, attempting to capture these moments. Looking back on the images, the joie de vivre that inspired them is lost in pixels. Belle Plaine reminds me of this feeling; of grasping at a moment that is passing by. Driving through the East Coast, fishing or watching the sky are moments where time is slowed down, where we can step out of our trajectories and admire the beauty of the world.
Belle Plaine, the ship, is tracking to return to Aotearoa on the 15th of April. It will likely have unloaded its cargo and set off again across the ocean highway by the time Wilkinson’s paintings are hung.Romily Plourde Marbrook
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Eight Hours, Gretchen Albrecht, text by Catharina van Bohemen, 2022
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Hilton Kramer, Abstraction and Utopia, New Criterion, 1997
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Bloch, “On the Present in Literature” in Utopian Function, translated Zipes and Mecklenburg, p. 208.
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Ruby Wilkinson, Belle Plaine, Aotearoa Art Fair 2026, Preview catalogue
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