We acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land on which the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art stands and recognise the creative contribution First Australians make to the art and culture of this country.
Fiona Hall / Australia b.1953 / Sundew (from ‘Insectivorous’ series) 2006 / Etching and chine collé on Hahnemühle 350gsm paper / 25 x 33cm / Purchased 2007. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Grant / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Fiona Hall
Fiona HallSundew (from ‘Insectivorous’ series) 2006
Not Currently on Display
Sundew belongs to Fiona Hall’s ‘Insectivorous’ series, a folio of prints that emerged from her involvement in the 2006 ‘Replant’ project. This project saw six female artists gather at Nauiyu on the Daly River in the Northern Territory to explore the diverse plant life of the ‘top end’ of Australia. Combining traditional knowledge, storytelling and plants with Western science, ‘Replant’ offered a new approach to botanical art.1
Hall’s work often features botanical themes, using her observations of the natural world as complex metaphors for the human condition. Hall explained:
I am fascinated by the deep connections between things. I have a love of botany, but I am beginning to think about the way the botanical world is totally inseparable to all living things, even the soil. The environment affects the way plants look and how species change from one place to another . . . I have done very highly defined drawings in a botanical way; they are about the specimen being an integral part of the habitat.2
Endnotes:
1 Angus Cameron, ‘Replant: A new generation of botanical art’, Nomad Art, October 2006, <nomadart.com.au/?p=4031>, viewed August 2020. The other ‘Replant’ artists were Deborah Wurrkidj, Irene Mungatopi, Judy Watson, Marita Sambono and Winsome Jobling.
2 Fiona Hall, quoted in Cameron, ‘Replant: A new generation of botanical art’.
Fiona Hall was born in 1953 in Sydney, where she studied painting at the National Art School in the early to mid 1970s. Later that decade, she worked in London as an assistant to British photographer Fay Godwin before relocating to New York, where she graduated in 1982 with a Master of Fine Arts (Photography) from the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester.
Since the early 1990s, Hall has exhibited in mixed media, particularly the innovative use of metals, including low relief, cutting, shaping and knitting. She transforms ordinary objects in order to analyse the relationship between nature and culture, exploring themes such as environmentalism, globalisation and consumerism.
Hall undertakes major public commissions and projects that embrace a range of media, and has increasingly engaged with themes of ecology, history and the effects of globalisation. She has mounted numerous solo exhibitions and participated in many group exhibitions both nationally and internationally, and was the country’s representative at the Australian Pavilion of the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015 with the installation work Wrong Way Time 2012–15.