When my boat comes in (detail)
2002 - ongoing
Agathis australis / New Zealand kauri pine
gouache on banknotes
courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
FIONA HALL
Australia
Auckland Art Gallery -
NEW Gallery
Money doesn't grow on trees - or does it? Plants have long played a crucial role in the history of trade and in the development of world economies. A number of species (including some whose origins are in the 'New', or 'Third' or 'developing' worlds) have been largely responsible for the rapid growth of European power and wealth over the past five hundred years. Plants, and along with them people (colonists, slaves, indentured labourers) 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.
- Fiona Hall, 2006 Contemporary Commonwealth, (Melbourne: National Gallery, 2006), 78.
Background
Born in Sydney, Australia in 1953, Fiona Hall lives and works in Adelaide. She has been active as an exhibiting artist since the mid 1970s. Hall's work has been included in the Biennale of Sydney; Asia Pacific Triennial, Brisbane; Adelaide Biennial and several of the Art Gallery of New South Wales Australian Perspecta exhibitions. Her work was the subject of a major self-titled retrospective at Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane in 2005, which toured to the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide. It was accompanied by a monograph written by exhibition curator, Julie Ewington. Other recent solo exhibitions include Cell Culture and Leaf Litter, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney; So so, Coffs Harbour City Gallery, 2005 and Fiona Hall, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, 2005. Selected group exhibitions include Face Up: Contemporary Art from Australia, Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, 2003; Living Together is Easy, Mito Arts Foundation, Mito-shi and National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2004; Strangely Familiar, University of Technology Sydney Gallery, 2005; Uncanny (the Unnaturally Strange), Artspace, Sydney, 2005; Contemporary Commonwealth, National Gallery of Victoria, 2006; and Prism: Contemporary Australian Art, Bridgestone Museum, Tokyo, 2006. Hall held the Asialink Lunugunga Residency in successive years from 1999-2005.
