[Right: Understory (detail) by Fiona Hall. 1999-2004. Glass beads, silver wire, vitrine. 170 x 140 x 75cm installed. Collection: the artist. Courtesy Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery.]
Fertile Obsessions
Hall is an unusual and remarkable artist, who, unlike many artists favoured by the curatorial jetset, is not preoccupied with images of narcissistic self-indulgence, but engages with some of the major social, environmental and political issues of our time. She creates provocative, volatile and loaded objects which need to be handled and viewed with extreme care. They are likely to challenge, offend, reward and amuse - all at the same time. Her selection of materials, imagery and technique are all highly deliberate acts and signal her different intentions.
The ubiquitous erotic sardine cans, through which the artist gained a popular notoriety in the early 1990s, present open cans with sprouting botanically precise sculptural plants with high relief tableaux of erotic vignettes. Below is written the botanical classification in the best tradition of Carl Linnaeus. It is this incongruous juxtaposition of the different systems of classification and visualisation that gives these objects their particular and potent impact. Meaning resides not in any one particular system, but in the seams created through the clash of systems.
In Tender, the artist's most recent work at the exhibition, the viewer is confronted with a large number of simulacra of birds' nests displayed in a specially designed glass vitrine reminiscent of 19th century museum display cases for ornithological specimens. Each bird's nest is an exact replica of one belonging to a specific bird species, but on closer examination, one becomes aware that these nests are not constructed of straw and twigs, but are woven out of shredded US one dollar bills, where the words "this note is legal tender" can be deciphered. So a system of classifying nests from a natural environment collides with a monetary code suggesting that globalisation and the Yankee dollar are the most destructive environmental forces in the world today. The bird nests are devoid of birds and of life and resemble museum exponents of extinct species, so that the whole work can be interpreted as being about loss and absence.
In Leaf litter, 1999-2003, again actual banknotes are employed, but now superimposed are some 183 individual leaves drawn with painstaking botanical accuracy. Here we have three systems colliding - that of botanical illustration, Linnaean and local vernacular classifications, and monetary systems. This sprawling work, some 12 metres long, aesthetically is seductively attractive, but once the viewer is entrapped by its beauty, it lends itself to many levels of interpretation about threatened and destroyed environments, the passing of empires, global trade and the whole ephemerality of being.
Fiona Hall builds up creations from tiny glass beads (which were the currency of colonisation), there are figures, heads and children's toys woven from video tape from violent war films, fantastic microcosms created from carved plastic plumbing pipe, fruits of trade carved from soap, baby clothes woven from shredded Coca Cola cans and alphabets made out of little aluminium tumbling naked men and women. Everything is wonderfully and obsessively crafted and imbued with a tactile beauty.
Fiona Hall's art is seductive to eye and challenging to the intellect. She has the rare ability to say something quite profound about something that is central to our being in a manner that is popularly accessible, visually exciting, and almost invariably laced with a whimsical erotic wit.
Mounted by the Queensland Art Gallery, The Art of Fiona Hall 1988-2005 is a major exhibition, accompanied by a lavishly illustrated book written by the show's curator, Julie Ewington.
The Art of Fiona Hall 1988-2005
Queensland Art Gallery Brisbane
19 March - 5 June 2005
Art Gallery of South Australia Adelaide
8 July - 11 September 2005
Fiona Hall
By Julie Ewington
Piper Press 2005
ISBN: 0975190113
192 pages, 230 colour illustrations
RRP $88.00
www.qag.qld.gov.au/home_fionaHall
www.artgallery.sa.gov.au
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