LUST
FOR LIFE
14 – 23 FEBRUARY
83 High Street, Prahran VIC 3181
Biography
Fiona Shewan
It's often pretty difficult for me to talk about my art practice. In ways I have moved away from research as a starting point to a more embodied practice. I think it contains a poetics of the everyday, finding beauty in small things that might be overlooked and extending on or opening up this beauty.
It is propelled by a deep desire to connect with others. Sometimes I find it difficult to believe in the possibility of intimacy because everything seems to operate in relation to capital and sometimes the connections I crave or try to express in my practice seem so far away, almost impossible. So, I guess melancholy is something that penetrates each work I make.
I often like to use optical registers when considering my practice because most of my work operates as an expanded exploration of photography and I think this terminology operates well on a metaphorical level too. So, I think fundamentally it is about sight, the way something is seen or seeing in general. I often like to draw attention to the way light interacts with matter, all substances of this world. And then at other times my work seems to evoke a kind of blindness. Perhaps in the way thoughts can restrict sight and awareness.
The series of c - type prints on display at Not Fair, along with the welded frames that house them were inspired by the famous Rowland S Howard song Autoluminescent and a passage I read in Thich Nhat Hanh's translation of The Heart Sutra, The Other Shore. Something about all life originating from the same structural composition of stars.
Welding was a fun deviation from the darkroom, and I found it interesting that the intense degree of heat required to fuse metals contains a light so strong, it is blinding to the human eye.
The prints are cameraless photographs I made using watercolours. After printing them in the darkroom, I loved how they drew me back to the Thich Nhat Hanh passage because many of the first iterations reminded me of clouded nebula, but I also love that they are abstract enough for people to play, construct their own meaning. Kind of like seeing feathered canyons in clouds.
The term 'autoluminescent' is defined as a substance that emits light from its own energy. I guess I had been thinking about animism, how everything is connected and at the same time each person or thing has its own light or unique value. How everything is simultaneously unified and singular. That there is something worth saving in everyone, in everything. That everything belongs in one way or another.
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Works
Untitled 2024. c-type print, steel frame, 35.5 cm x 23.9 cm,
Untitled, c-type, steel, 31 cm x 40 cm.
Proudly Supported by:
NotFair Art Foundation
info@notfair.com.au