Fiona Hall: Force Field
Fiona Hall: Force Field
12 July – 19 October 2008
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In Fiona Hall: Force Field natural curiosity, everyday materials and an exquisitely unpredictable imagination meet. Sardine tins, knitted videotape and birds nests’ made of American dollars feature in a show rife with transformations, where metaphors are used to challenge representation and revisualise everyday objects. Force Field leads the viewer along a provocative route via utopian narratives, the histories of language and colonisation, and the ethics of consumption. The human body is an important site in many works. Scar Tissue (2003–04) underlines the impact of the modern world on the human form, alluding to the ways in which the body is being reinvented through technology and the media. This work, with its echoes of recent Middle East conflicts, explores the notion that war, and media depictions thereof, have essentially redesigned the human body.
The show reveals both the consistency of a major body of work, and paradoxes within it, acknowledging the influence of extensive travel, of a sharply observant mind and minutely considered process. There is often a strong link between materials and messages. In works such as Medicine bundle for the non-born child (1993-94), tiny garments are knitted from threads of aluminium cans, and the layette is accompanied by a six pack of teated Coca cola bottles. The history of importation of plants (cola nuts from Africa and cocoa leaves from South America, originally valued for medicinal reasons) is pointedly juxtaposed with the history and global implications of the soft drink.
The capacity for innovation is a definitive characteristic of Fiona Hall’s practice. The inventiveness which continues to typify her work reveals the artist’s insatiable curiosity about the world around her. Hall’s large body of work, widely various in materials and techniques, broadly concerns the nexus of nature and culture. Her works have taken forms as diverse as photography, botanical illustrations on banknotes, meticulously carved sardine tins, knitted videotape, and intricately structured beaded sculptures. Narratives turning on the intersection of desire for consumer goods, scientific knowledge and the current state of the environment all contribute significantly to Hall’s practice. Her own knowledge is articulated in a voice that is by turns witty, humourous, savagely critical or ironic. Nature and culture are paralleled, and often it is the aesthetic treatment and ‘crafting’ of the works that simultaneously celebrates the marvel of nature and laments humanity’s impact on it.
Hall’s ongoing interest in the histories and botanical classifications of plants has continued through annual residencies at a garden estate in Sri Lanka since 1999. In 1997 she was the recipient of the inaugural Contempora 5 art award, and in 1999 the prestigious Clemenger Art Award. She was appointed to the Advisory Council of the Australian National University’s Centre for the Mind in 1998. Hall has exhibited widely, including in the Queensland Art Gallery’s ‘Second Asia–Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ in 1996, and is represented in every major public collection in Australia.
Fiona Hall: Force Field, curated by Gregory O’Brien, Paula Savage and Vivienne Webb, is a partnership between the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and City Gallery Wellington. A new monograph designed by Sarah Maxey (Nice Work) and generously supported by Dr Roderick and Gillian Deane, will be published in March 2008 to accompany the exhibition.
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