Exhibition brochure text

Fiona Hall : Force Field

force field (noun) 1. a region or barrier of usually invisible force. 2. an area in the human spinal cord. 3. a set of equations used in molecular mechanics. 4. a vector field showing the forces exerted by one thing upon another.

This exhibition presents an in-depth survey of works by leading Australian artist Fiona Hall dating from the 1970s to the present. Born in Sydney (1953), and based in Adelaide, Hall began her career as a photographer but later branched out into diverse media including sculpture, installation, garden design and video. Her work is characterised by its use of ordinary objects and materials, which are transformed into complex and evocative art works.

Hall’s practice over the past four decades has explored the many points of intersection between nature and culture. Drawing on historical and contemporary sources, her concerns vary from the global to the deeply personal. In recent years, Fiona Hall has found new impetus for her work in travel, not only throughout Australia but also to Sri Lanka, Guyana and, most recently, New Zealand, where she has created important new works drawing on natural and human histories.

Like a ‘force field’ of conflicting energies, her art is shaped by various systems of knowledge, commerce and colonisation, frequently highlighting the political and environmental impact of imperialism. She draws upon many areas of human endeavour and experience, including literature, politics, finance, mass media, science, horticulture and metaphysics. Not only is her work remarkable for the continuity of its ideas and interests, but also for its restless pursuit of new artistic possibilities and its capacity to re-engage with shifting social and environmental issues.

Paradoxical in nature, the works contain beauty and anxiety, hope and a sense of loss. At once an explorer and a pilgrim, a creator and a fastidious observer, Fiona Hall has produced a body of work that has significance and reach well beyond the art world… Her works encapsulate and explore some of the central issues of our time: genetic engineering, global warming, environmentalism and poverty.
(Elizabeth Ann Macgregor and Paula Savage)

WEST GALLERY
paradise / symbiosis

Central to the exhibition is a group of works that explore humanity’s relationship to concepts of Paradise. Begun in 1990, Fiona Hall’s celebrated series of sardine-tin sculptures, Paradisus terrestris, revolves around the age-old desire for harmony with nature and for a return to the Garden of Eden.

Hall’s art makes us aware of conflicting systems for understanding and controlling the natural world – on the labels accompanying Paradisus terrestris, Botanical Latin, vernacular and indigenous languages propose competing frameworks for knowing and classifying the biodiversity around us. While nature is central to culture, religion and science, Hall’s complex and paradoxical works make it clear that the natural world is ultimately owned and contained by no one.

Alert to the extraordinary capabilities of animal and plant life, Fiona Hall’s art frequently echoes the workings of the natural world and the processes of adaptation and interaction she observes there. Castles in the Air of the Cave Dwellers (2008) brings together forms based on insect nests and human brains, hinting at notions of collective intelligence and social organisation.

While Stronghold (2007) and Insectivorous (2006) take us close up to the minute workings of nature, in Cell Culture (2001-2), Dead in the water (1999) forms and materials from human society are drawn into the sometimes competitive, at other times mutually supportive relationships between species of insects, plants and marine organisms. Human society and the natural world overlap in ways that are at once disconcerting and seductive. Linking cultural, political and botanical history, Understorey (1999-2004) suggests that humanity is not external to, but enmeshed within the complex and delicate web of the natural world.

EAST GALLERY
consumption

The works in this gallery span over 25 years of Fiona Hall’s art. In radically different ways, they use the domestic realm as a point of departure. The artist’s fascination with the interface between popular culture and the natural world is evident the photographic images produced between the mid 1970s and mid 1980s.

While ‘home is where the heart is’, it is also a zone in which the material, emotional and spiritual aspects of life jostle, clash and sometimes achieve a tentative equilibrium. The ethics and politics of daily life take shape through the forms of familiar household items—everyday, throw-away materials reflecting the many decisions and rituals of consumption. Fiona Hall shreds and then knits Coca Cola cans into babyclothes (in Medicine bundle for the non-born child (1994)), carves soap (in Give a dog a bone (1996)), and incorporates Tupperware containers into an electrical circuit (The price is right, from 1994). In Mire (2005) that most domestic of things, the wool-pile carpet, becomes a meditation on militarism and the destruction of natural habitats in the Middle East.

SOUTH GALLERY
body / territory

Fiona Hall’s art is shaped by an awareness of the body not only as something sexual, vulnerable and a part of ‘nature’, but also as a political and complex entity, absorbing influences and concepts from the media and from contemporary society. In Words (1990), she uses a series of human forms to spell out a proverb, linking together body and mind, the physical world and language.

Hall’s art celebrates, explores and often subverts notions of sensuality and intimacy. Witty, playful and even shocking, creations such as Scar Tissue (2003-4), Syntax of Flowers (1992) and Morality dolls—the seven deadly sins (1984) tease and provoke our sense of privacy and propriety. Exploitation and violence are to the fore in Scar Tissue (2003-04), a work suggestive of the ways in which war and the mass media have reconfigured the human form.

At either end of this gallery, we ponder the effects of humanity on the world at large. An important work created after numerous visits to New Zealand in 2007, Mourning Chorus (2007-8) is a lament for lost species of native birds. Inside a coffin-shaped glass case, she has replaced the skulls of birds with the kinds of plastic containers that now clog the waterways and habitats those birds once frequented.

Constructed of shredded American money, Tender (2003-5) is at once a critique of monetarist culture and a celebration of the ingenuity and industry of nesting birds. The serial numbers of the dollar notes are etched onto the surface of the glass case—a reminder of the previous life of the currency. Cycles of finance and trade are subsumed into cycles of natural life on the planet. Through mapping the convergence of humans and nature, Hall reflects upon what we have lost already and what we still stand to lose.

NORTH GALLERY
trade

The works in this gallery weave together narratives of exploitation, global trade and colonial history. The room is encircled by Hall’s ongoing major work When my boat comes in (2002–), which presents an extended meditation on the interrelation of plants and human industry, alert to the overlapping projects of exploration and commerce. Cash Crop (1998) which comprises banknotes overlaid with images of plant-life, also draws our attention to the value we attribute to plants and their historical and contemporary role in the flow of finance.

Occupied Territory (1995) looks further back to the exchange of nails and beads which were central to the early phases of colonialism. The work evokes the conflict, plunder and suffering that are so much a part of that history. While highlighting the global reach of the free market and colonialism, Fiona Hall’s art also tracks the desires and dreams, the spiritual and the physical needs of the individual. True to the world around it, her art is an interconnected biosystem, of threads and knots, linking harsh realities with personal experience, dreams and perceptions.