Billboard
NIGEL BANKS, 2024
Imagine a message that captures your whole journey – perceptive, passionate, poetic – pasted onto a wind-weathered billboard in the middle of a Central Plateau Nowhere. That’s Billboard: a love letter to the sky, written in fonts no eye will ever scan. Beautiful. Invisible. Still offered.
Inspired by John Jantsch’s notion of the lonely website – that brave little cyber-hermit waving from its unvisited corner – Billboard asks: What becomes of self-expression when it echoes into silence? And is it still beautiful if no one claps?
Billboard arcs from the puffed-up pronouncements of youth to the pared-back, gentle presence of eventual wisdom. At first, we shout our projects across the void – bold, buzzing, writ large. But wind, water, time, and heartbreak sandblast our slogans. What remains is quiet resonance. Compassion for all we turned out to be.
Eventually, the ego drags up an old sofa beside the soul, proffers liquid refreshment, and says: “Hey. You did OK.” In that moment, the folly of every billboard crystallises. We’re left with a choice.
We can pop out through the black hole with gratitude into forever peace. It was enough.
Or we can loop back for the coda – make another pass and a more beautiful story, now that we’ve finally got the message, right where it matters.
Oil, alkyd, polyurethane and gold leaf (24K) on mulberry paper over linen on 4 mm ACM sheet.
Find installation info here.
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See second, annotated photograph of the picture.
1 — Desert Plains – North Island’s Central Plateau: A harsh, testing landscape where life’s journey quietly unfolds. Long ago shaped beneath the sea and later raised by fire, its barren beauty reflects the unseen forces that shape resilience and reveal character. (sorry - this one is not on the image - can go anywhere beneath the billboard, between the coda and the central section of the picture)
2 — Stick: The beginning of Life’s journey, the moment of arrival. Modelled on a piece of driftwood from the harbour’s mouth at Mount Maunganui – weathered, grounded, and shaped by its origins.
3 — Coda: The markers of departure and return – the left marks life’s beginning, the right its completion. Between them lies the chance to journey, reflect, and choose: to return, repeat, or dissolve into the unknown.
4 — Billboard: The public face we construct – our aspirations, projections, and declarations of identity. Early in life, our outer image and inner self often appear aligned, though both are in a long process of evolution beneath the surface.
5 — Lava Flow, Waterfall, Wind: Natural forces that challenge the traveller to let go of what no longer serves. Through resistance and renewal, balanced character is gradually shaped.
6 — OK Girl: Forever curious, courageous, and unafraid, OK Girl stands outside of time – fully present, fully engaged with the unfolding moment.
Her figure, poised on the hillside, echoes the ancient human impulse to declare character on the land itself – as with the Long Man of Wilmington.
She is not just drawn into the world; she is a drawing-out – an embodiment of our urge to build ourselves out there, in form, in presence, in gesture.
7 — Ego / Self: The phase where ego and true self have evolved to become distinct yet in balanced harmony. A moment in life’s arc when deeper wisdom steadies the tension between outward identity and inner truth.