Fiona Hall, Leaf Litter, 2000 - 2002 (detail). Crambe maritima - sea kale, gouache on bank notes.
Hall Ways
14 March 2005
Over the past two decades Fiona Hall has proved to be an artist of rare wit, with a knack for creating incredibly intricate art objects. The diversity of her practice, which incorporates sculpture, painting and photography, is on display in this exhibition at the Queensland Art Gallery, and is the first survey of Hall’s work at a major Australian institution in more than 10 years. Focusing on her output from 1988 to the present, the exhibition includes two major, recent works, Understorey and Tender, both being exhibited for the very first time.
Although Hall was born in Sydney, she has lived and worked in Adelaide since the early eighties. Following initial painting studies from 1977 to 1978, she worked in London as an assistant to British photographer Fay Godwin. From London, Hall moved to the USA where she completed a Master of Fine Arts (Photography) at the Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester. After returning to Australia she undertook several residencies, including a stint at Brisbane’s Mt Coot-tha Botanic Gardens in 1998. The following year she took up resident’s position at a garden estate in Lunaganga, Sri Lanka owned by architect Geoffrey Bawa.
In 1997 Hall was the recipient of the inaugural Contempora 5 Art Award, and in 1999 the Clemenger Art Award. She has exhibited widely, 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. Leaf litter (2000 - 03) was acquired by the National Gallery of Australia in 2003 – a work exhibited there previously as part of the NGA’s Federation exhibition in 2001. The work is an ongoing series of 200 gouache paintings of botanically accurate leaves rendered on foreign paper currency, produced during her residency in Sri Lanka.
On Leaf Litter, Hall has said: “Money doesn’t grow on trees – or does it? Plants have played a crucial role in the history of colonisation and the development of world economies. Many species have been responsible for the rapid growth of European power and wealth over the past five hundred years. Plants, and along with them people, have been shifted across oceans, battles have been waged over them, forests razed.
“But everything comes at a price, and now we are paying heavily for over-taxing the environment and for cultivating an ever-widening gap between rich and poor nations. Many of the once most plant resource-rich countries are now amongst the poorest on earth. Leaf Litter aligns the distribution of plant species with the distribution of monetary wealth.”
Senior Curator of Australian Painting and Sculpture at the NGA Dr Deborah Hart has said of the work: “In the course of working on Leaf litter, Hall became increasingly adept and inventive, utilising the distinctive designs on the notes to full advantage. At times she allows the faces to read through lacy veils of paint like ghosts from the past, intersecting with the delicate tracery of leaf veins that in turn suggest the ‘skin’ of the paper, as well as human veins and capillaries.”
More Information
Fiona Hall
19 March - 5 June
Queensland Art Gallery, Melbourne St, South Brisbane
8 July – 11 September
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
Details: (07) 3840 7303
Website: http://www.qag.qld.gov.au/
