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Fiona Hall / Australia b.1953 / Words 1990 / Beaten aluminium / 179 components: 18 x 12 x 0.5cm (each, approx.); 18 x 2160 x 0.5cm (installed, approx.) / Purchased 1996. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Fiona Hall
Fiona HallWords 1990
Not Currently on Display
Fiona Hall, best known as a photographer, has increasingly explored ways of making three-dimensional work. Words is an ambitious, widely admired sculpture which represents this area of her art-making very well. A long line of small naked male and female human figures stand, lie and squat in contorted poses which form letters of the alphabet.
The aluminium figures in this frieze are cut from soft drink cans, then beaten and pressed into shape using a metal-smith’s repoussé technique. She first began to work this way during the late 1980s, as an extension of her photography which already incorporated less detailed repoussé metal figures. Words are important to Hall’s work, which often has a literary source and may be inscribed with text.
The text spelled out in Words conveys a notion of circularity or a questing path which leads back to the self: ‘The route you take lies parallel to the words along these walls you slide along in search of that which might be said each step assured or bored or trembling to discover finally only that one foot has followed the other.’
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.