binding the halves together, 2025
Dr Kirsty Baker
Written in response to The Other Half (for Annie Victoria Ribe) by Fiona Clark

It’s 2025.  
Fiona Clark is walking around the reflective facade of the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery and Len Lye Centre. Her feet are shackled.  

It’s 1977.  
A car and motorbike collide. The brutal impact shatters the right side of Fiona’s face.  

It’s 1998. 
I’m locked inside a small room with a man whose physicality seems to subsume the whole world. 

It’s 2017.  
I’m rushing through London in a deluge of rain, fresh off the mind-bendingly disorienting series of flights that had carried me from Te Whanganui a Tara.  

On a trip to the UK to visit my family, I happened to arrive in London, entirely by coincidence, on the final day of the exhibition 56 Artillery Lane at Raven Row. The group exhibition featured work from an international line-up of artists, including Fiona Clark. Back then I had not yet met Fiona, but as a Doctoral student in art history I had just begun my research into her practice in earnest. As such, this quirk of timing felt like a form of invitation. I remember making my way through the city in the bleary-eyed and dislocated state particular to long-haul travel, feeling entirely out of both time and place.  

On reflection, this was an ideal state in which to first encounter The Other Half, a soft-edged yet brutal body of work. At once a sprawling constellation of bodily imagery and an incisively sharp engagement with physical trauma, this iteration of The Other Half offered fragments from a bodily archive that refused to sit within my limited understanding of Fiona’s work at that time. I had come to her practice – as many of us have – through her socially and politically engaged photography. The hand stitched fabrics, ilfochrome prints on hessian, the x-ray films and ‘genomegrams’ sat outside of my limited perception of Fiona as a photographer.i Here was a collector, a researcher, an embroiderer, a performer, a body, a consciousness, all laid out across the gallery walls in Spitalfields. Made between 1997 and 1999, these works catalogue Fiona’s complex medical journey following her car accident in 1977. Many of the images here document the injuries she sustained, as well as the medical interventions which followed. Images of Fiona’s injured face, taken shortly after the crash, are repeated numerous times across the installation. Often her bloodied face is closely cropped in the camera’s frame, her eyes closed, her head bandaged.  

In x-rays and neurological scans, the evidence of medical procedures seems as physically brutalising as the original injuries themselves. Repair does not nullify trauma. They are, rather, cumulative. Trauma is overlaid by repair, which is often, once again, overlaid by trauma. Layers of brutality and tenderness are stitched together into the bodies of those of us who carry both trauma and the effort of its repair. I often wonder how much my own early experiences of bodily trauma have shaped the kinds of work that I’m driven to write about, the artists whose work I’m drawn to. At its root, sexual violence – like almost every form of violence – is ultimately about power, it is the adoption of physical force as a strategy for disempowerment. So perhaps it is almost predictable that I return time and time again to artists who refute the limits of sovereignty and autonomy that have been imposed upon them, to artists who resist the force of totalising systems of power. Fiona is one such artist.  

Fiona’s practice is expansive in a way that is difficult to comprehend in a world shaped by capitalism and commodification – it is not a facet of her life that exists independently from who she is and how she moves through the world. Fiona’s deep commitment to documenting, cataloguing, observing and protesting industrial incursions into the land, the waterways and the lives of the people of Taranaki spans her entire artistic practice. The structuring forces of power that shape our world are all entangled within her work, often held within materials and imagery that seem, at first, to be quotidian. Take, for example, the hessian sacking which dominates The Other Half (for Annie Victoria Ribe). These salvaged materials speak to a rugged mythology of hard-working industry, but they speak too of violence, of the commodification of land and people. These sacks, once used to hold blood and bone fertiliser or sugar, are a product of the industrialisation of agriculture as a means of extracting money from the land. They make me think, too, of the thousands of people from across the wider Pacific who were lured and forced into indentured labour in the Australian and New Zealand sugar trade. Colonial systems of production commodify people in the same ways that they commodify the land. These networks of colonial industry shape both dispossession and livelihoods. This complexity is carried in the material detritus that Fiona has gathered and adapted.  

In her hands, these hessian sacks have been made to carry the weight of contradiction, the deeply entangled and implicated nature of our relationship to the modes of production they represent. In the 2025 video work what would this space look like without fossil fuel company sponsorship? Fiona herself wears this hessian. The rough agricultural material has been fashioned into layers of clothing – an apron of sugar sacking, a dress, a bag – that drape her body as she walks around the distinctive reflective exterior of the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery / Len Lye Centre in Ngāmotu New Plymouth. It takes a moment for us to realise that her feet are shackled. The land beneath her has been deeply altered by the industries of agriculture and petrochemical extraction. Across Taranaki, fracking is doing to the land what sea-based drilling has done to the moana. Extractive, commodified, focused on relentless forward progress. But forward into what future? The work’s title points directly to the networks of power and commodification much of her work interrogates, here tying it directly to the arts landscape and the corporate interests that have shaped it. 

In The Other Half (for Annie Victoria Ribe) Fiona Clark holds together matrilineal lines of trauma and repair, cumulative experiences made material through the processes of physical making, gathering and documenting. In the confined space of COMMODE the dense materiality of Clark’s installation seems to tear through the fabric of time, spilling forth an accumulation of experience, exchange and adaptation. Here is that hessian bag once used to hold blood and bone fertiliser, and another that once held sugar. They connect this work directly to the film in which she wears them, and the photographs she has made of the land so impacted by the industries they represent. Here are fragments of a place that has been brutalised and repaired, brutalised and repaired, many times over, a land that has shifted and altered under the weight of extraction. Here, too, are the disembodied fragments of a multitude of plastic dolls, their limbs tightly bound in thread. These limbs, brutalised and repaired, remind me immediately of Fiona’s fragmentary self-representation in The Other Half. These two separate other halves call out to each other across time and place, their points of connection binding together the multitudinous ground they traverse. 

When I saw those works in London in 2017, twenty years after their creation, they had not been exhibited in Aotearoa. I think of the ways that our understanding of an artist's work is shaped by so many factors that exist outside of the work itself. Art history is full of blind spots. Often, they are formed when we are unwilling to see the entirety of a practice that expands into the world in the way that Fiona’s does. To see these works here, to see them now, to see them framed in relation to trauma, and within the scope of her life and practice – this kind of seeing feels like a reparative act.