Start with the gap. The two halves form one circle, and they do not meet — a narrow channel of untouched paper runs the full height between them, from the top of the ring to the bottom. The composition is one shape made of two things that are not joined, and the piece makes no move to resolve that. Likeness is not sameness. The whole title is a comparison, not an equation, and the seam is where the comparison lives.
Then the colours, which are doing more than decoration. Terracotta is clay that has been fired — changed by heat, finished, no longer able to become anything else. Sand is the same material before any of that happened. Mother and daughter are rendered in one substance at two stages of becoming. You could make the point in a sentence; the palette makes it without one.
They sit identically. Knees drawn up, head bowed onto a forearm, face in profile — the same posture, reversed. Nothing in the drawing tells you they are alike. The drawing simply repeats, and you conclude it yourself. That is a harder way to write a sentence and a better one.
But they are not the same size. The left figure is fuller, and her half-circle is a solid mass; the right is smaller, held in what reads more as a crescent than a half. One contains the shape the other is still growing into. Which of those is the mother is not stated, and the two possible answers are both uncomfortable in interesting ways.
The letters are colour-coded to the figure each describes — “LIKE MOTHER” in terracotta on the left, “LIKE DAUGHTER” in sand on the right — and they are split by the same vertical seam that divides the circle. Even the language is halved. The one word that crosses the middle is the one in both phrases: like.
And it is the only landscape work in the range. It has to be. A piece about two things sitting side by side cannot be made to stand up.