FIONA HALL

Born 1953 in Sydney, Australia. Lives and works in Adelaide, Australia.

Fiona Hall, Breeding Ground, 2007, 11 painted beehives and planted garden bed, installation view at Trentham Cottage garden, Port Arthur. Courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney. Photograph: Fiona Hall

Fiona Hall is best known for works that transform ordinary, everyday materials into organic forms with both a historical and contemporary relevance. She works across a wide range of media, from sculpture and painting to installation, garden design and video. In the early part of her career she worked primarily in photography; however, during the 1980s, she began to incorporate the diverse range of practices found in her work today.

Materiality and transformation are the core elements of her work. She uses a range of quotidian materials such as soap, currency, packaging and soft-drink cans to produce objects modelled after natural forms. These objects, which are sometimes collected into museum-style glass cases with accompanying texts, are characterised by their intricate construction and thematic resonance with issues of globalisation, ecology and natural history.

Through the use of evocative materials and images drawn from the environment, Hall explores the boundaries between the natural and the man-made, subtly and sometimes ironically reflecting on issues of taxonomy, collection, endangerment and extinction. She also pays attention to the overlaying of names – official and otherwise – of plants and species, as well as to the legal and historical fictions associated with colonisation. In different works she has carved complex plant forms and bodily parts into the tin of polished, re-used sardine cans and has painted delicate details of botanical specimens over the paper money of their native country. She has also used shredded US dollar bills to make collections of birds’ nests; carved out of soap the fruits, plants and vegetables historically associated with trade; and recycled empty plastic chemical containers to recreate the bodies of extinct or endangered bird species of New Zealand.

Hall’s meticulous attention to detail emphasises the beauty and fragility of the natural world. The delicacy with which she handles her medium demonstrates a palpable affinity for the vulnerability of living things. However, her mixing of man-made materials with the forms of nature can be provocative, creating bizarre and politically charged objects. This conceptual discord is balanced by her highly appealing aesthetic, which acts as a lure to draw the viewer in to contemplate her message.

Hall’s naturalistic assemblages of incongruous objects highlight the idea of the exotic and toxic nature of introduced species. In certain works, Hall has paralleled the parasitic relationship that she believes exists between the human and the natural world with the relationship between colonisers and colonised. For the 17th Biennale of Sydney, she will produce a new work in the Royal Botanic Gardens entitled The Barbarians at the Gate. A group of beehives, painted in military camouflage patterns associated with different countries, are introduced into the gardens – foreign objects analogous to the shipping in of people in colonial times. One of the hives will contain a live colony of Trigona carbonaria, also known as the Sugarbag Bee. To allude further to the sprawl of human and botanic traffic around the world, each individual hive is given a new, stylised ‘roof’ that can be easily recognised as architecture relating to a particular country – the same country represented by its corresponding camouflage design. Further, bees are described as ‘social insects’, and their ordered colonies can be likened to societies with rigorous town planning, or to prisons. Dealing as well with introduced plant species, a key element of the work involves Hall’s planting of grain in a garden bed alongside the hives. With these actions, the artist creates a microcosm of the colonial-era nation-building processes of introducing people, plants and animals into foreign habitats, forever changing the ecology of a particular place.

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2008 ‘Fiona Hall, Force Field’, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia (travelling exhibition)
2005 ‘Fiona Hall’, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane and Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia
1998 ‘Cash Crop’, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia
1994 ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Australia (travelling exhibition)

Selected Group Exhibitions

2009 ‘Against Exclusion’, 3rd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia
2009 ‘Ecologies’, Lismore Regional Gallery, Lismore, Australia
2008 ‘Uneasy: Recent South Australian Art’, Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art, Adelaide, Australia
2007 ‘DeOverkant/Downunder’, Den Haag Sculpture 2007, The Netherlands
2007 ‘Turbulence’, 3rd Auckland Triennial, New Zealand

Selected Bibliography

Ashley Crawford, ‘Fiona Hall’ in ‘50 Most Collectable Artists 2007’, Australian Art Collector, issue 39, January–March 2007, p. 125
Julie Ewington, Fiona Hall, Piper Press, Sydney, 2005
‘Fiona Hall’, Art World, issue 3, February–March 2008, pp. 86–91
John McDonald, ‘A force to be reckoned with’, Sydney Morning Herald, 19–20 April 2008, pp. 16–17
Gregory O’Brien, Paula Savage and Vivienne Webb, Fiona Hall: Forcefield, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and City Gallery Wellington, Wellington, 2008