HIDDEN MESSAGE Case Study 3

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FIONA HALL

Understory (detail) (1999-2004) Ambystoma mexicanum / axolotl, 2009-2011

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Practice

Through her transformations of everyday materials into complex objects, Fiona Hall explores a wide range of complex issues. These include the histories of language and colonisation, and the current state of the environment. Hall creates art works that are metaphors for the messages she explores. Many of her works have the ability to transform our views of everyday items. She does this by drawing on the history of the object, the language we use to describe them, or their place in the contemporary world. This link between materials and messages is compelling in many of Hall’s works. Her large-scale Polaroid photographs of the mid 1990s reflect consumer products and the desire people have for them. The artist has also used the Polaroid photograph to explore, in visual form, the stories of the ‘great books’ of literature.

Fiona Hall’s background in photography and painting is closely connected to developments in her sculpture since the 1990s. The artist’s photographs are actually images of three-dimensional scenes she has intricately crafted from materials including tin, plastic, paint, and found objects. These tabletop ‘sets’ are then photographed using a large-scale Polaroid camera.

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The complexity of Fiona Hall’s works comes from her exploration of many fields of interest. However, curator Julie Ewington suggests that:

. . . despite her excursions into a great variety of materials, and her wide-ranging travels, throughout three decades Fiona Hall has continued to pursue one overarching theme: the intricate and necessarily unfinished project of humanity’s relationship with nature.

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Fiona Hall has always been fascinated by visual density, by close tonalities that eschew strong colour in favour of the subtle ambiguity. She loves intensity and intricacy, both images and ideas.

Since 1975 Hall has embraced numerous artistic practices. Originally majoring in painting, during the past four decades Hall has disclosed a number of art disciplines over a substantial body of work. She has worked with the photographic medium, involving postmodernist practice, including appropriation. In her plight to deal with the relationship to history, her ceramics, sculpture, architecture and use of technology transformed ordinary or discarded material. In the continuum, Hall is influenced by diverse range of perspectives and experiences; historical and contemporary. Her oeuvre of art is compelling in its intricacies, ‘obsessive’ attention to detail, multifaceted visual and literal language, historical and scientific reference. Markedly, Hall blurs artistic disciplines in her attempt to construct a relationship with mythology, history and humankind’s relationship with nature.

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Quote

“We share a great deal with plants, and use them frequently as erotic metaphors. The basis of our shared existence is that, scientifically, we are now more fully able and obliged to acknowledge. I heard on a radio program a few years ago that it has been found that plants have haemoglobin – this was quite a shocking and exhilarating revelation for me. There are more genetic similarities between us, and the plant world than there are differences. These are mind-blowing concepts that should make us take notice, because if we can’t coexist with and maintain the plant world then human life is doomed”.

Fiona Hall

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Inspirations

“The Divine Comedy is not so much about damnation, probably more about ‘the dark side’, the truly scary side of existence, the personal hell for all of us. Everyone has their demons and each of us has to encounter pitfalls. I am aware this is a contemporary reading, since I am not a Christian. But life has to be contended with, and Dante’s writing is an exquisite rendition of these fears, and the journey to overcome adversity.” -Fiona Hall, telephone interview with the author, May 2003

Dürer, “The Expulsion From Paradise, Small Passion, 3” (1510).

William Blake, “The Divine Comedy, Inferno II”, (1825-1827)

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“Inferno, canto XIX: The Simoniacs”, The Divine Comedy, (1988)

“Birds”, The Antipodean Suite, (1981)

“Temptation of Eve”, Paradise Series, (1984)

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Paradisus Terrestris, 1989-90

Seemingly simple, Paradisus Terrestris is actually rich and complex. Hall teases out gloriously fertile associations connecting flowers and plants with sexual desire. In fact, flowers are the sexual parts of plants.

“Citrus paradise/grapefruit”, (1989-90)

“Dionaea muscipula/Venus fly-trap”, (1989-90)

Nelumbo nucifera/Lotus, 1998

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“The sardine cans came out of a feeling about the way plants grow-the delicacy, the individuality of every living thing, the process of it, the being alive – and how you can translate all those feelings into whatever your own medium is. The way Calvino does it in his writing is fantastic. I read Invisible Cities, then The Baron in the Trees, and I love Mr Palomar and Cosmi-comics. Calvino has a very strong sense of the space in a garden or in a landscape, though often he does not write about landscape at all, or perhaps refers to it in the folk tales he collects. Borges in fine, but Calvino has gotten under my skin. He is my favourite author, if there is one.” -Fiona Hall, interview with the author, May 2003

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Fern garden, 1998

“The semi-enclosed garden derives from the medieval ‘hortus conclusus’, the walled garden standing for the woman’s womb and, metonymically, her entire body. All that grows within is nourished by her power.”

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Medicine Bundle For The Non-born Child 1994

“Medicine Bundle for the non-born child was Hall’s most memorable work in Biodata. It is enchanting. The baby’s layette, recalling innumerable patterns from popular Australian women’s magazines, is knitted from strips made from Coca-Cola tins, and comes complete with a six-pack of teated ‘bottles’ So this is what is now imbibed instead of Mother’s milk? This anti-consumerist indictment simultaneously notes the degradation of plant products and the ironies of contemporary parenting.

The work turns on the history of coca leaves from South America and cola nuts from Africa; both were venerated medicinal plants in their original settings but Coca-Cola is now celebrated as the world’s favourite soft drink, the global marker of modernity par excellence. Curiously, Coca-Cola is used successfully as a spermicide in the developing world. The drink is equally successful symbolically, having colonised the significance of plants it refers to their cultures of origin, as surely as elsewhere.”

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The Real Thing (diptych), (1994) 46

About the work

“The most complex image was The Real Thing, a diptych showing two enviably selfcontained Lohans who are equally immune from past regrets and present torments. Lohans are sages, enlightened beings venerated by Buddhists, who have achieved such transcendent goodness that they will be spared the indignity of rebirth. They are serene but Fiona Hall’s image is savage. She fashioned the figures out of a Diet Coke can, a drink equally innocent of sugar and natural plant extracts. If the gods of global trade have triumphed over local deities, and Diet Coke is now more ‘real’ than the substances that named it, Hall has not set up a simple dichotomy between paradise in traditional societies and a demonic globalising power. Rather, she interrogates the complex histories of international trade, asking the hard questions about the uses of botanical knowledge and the outcomes of global exploration. The can identities Coca-Cola, and the image clips “diet” to “die”, asking whether the trade which transforms plants and products is as indifferent as the holy men seem to be.”

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Understorey 1999-2004

In Understorey (1999-2004), the implied conflicts between cultures and peoples that was traced so delicately, so ironically in Paradisus Terrestris entitled (1996) and the Sri Lankan series of 1999 is now made explicit.

The work takes its title from the botanical term for the layer of vegetation that lies underneath the tallest trees in a forest, which is a crucial component of the ecosystem.

In the understorey the delicate balance necessary to sustain the life of the forest is secured. The understorey often embraces the greatest biodiversity in tropical forests, which Sri Lanka, as elsewhere in the tropics, are now under constant threat.

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Tender 2003-05

Tender (2003-05), also relates to conflict and destruction, but this time the focus the focus is on animal habitats. Hall turned once more to the complex intersections between the natural world and human systems of trade. The work consists of dozens of simulacra of birds’ nests of all shapes and sizes, improbably fashioned from American one-dollar bills, each bearing the official declaration: ‘This note is legal tender’. The American dollar is the most desired currency in Third World countries, and for those desperate for it, like birds scavenging for material to build their nests, the greenback provides shelter. Here, in its ubiquity and availability, the dollar bill is made to assume the form of each exquisitely differentiated avian habitat, at exactly the moment when modernisation, the advance of capitalism and the spread of deforestation is depriving many birds, animals and indeed people, of their own environments.

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Leaf Litter 1999-2003 50

About the work

“Money doesn’t grow on trees–or does it? Plants have played a crucial role in the history of colonization and the development of world economies. Many species have been responsible for the rapid growth of European power and wealth over the past 500 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. It also displays botanical connections across diverse territories, for plants, like people, have colonised where they can. Closely related species belonging to the same botanical family have evolved and adapted to wide-ranging habitats.” -Fiona Hall, in notes used for the wall text in the Federation exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2001, and published in the exhibition notes for Hall’s exhibition Leaf Litter & Cell Culture, Roslyn Oxley 9 Gallery, Sydney, October 2002.

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Further information

Force Field 1 Force Field 2

Force Field 3 Force Field 4

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