ARTIST: Fiona
DATE: 2024
MEDIUM: Fabric soaked in salt on metal
‘My work is about the environment I grew up in, a reminder of things, etched on my body, that cannot and should not be forgotten. This art is an alchemy, and within it, a conduit of understanding.
I found a bed frame in the street, and it was the most beautiful old vintage bed frame, with the springs off it. It made me think about some of the nights when, at the hands of men, I was sexually and physical abused. I’d said ‘no’ and that was very difficult for a young woman to do, back then, but I did it. I’ve always been a fighter, so I decided I wanted to get that old bedframe and use it to make my artwork. I wanted to give it that feeling of the sandstone I used to escape to and the sea into which I would go to get away. Rusting the bed frame was to acknowledge that sometimes some things happen that you cannot escape. It dictates a part of who you are. Intimacy, everybody knows I find very difficult, and this art is a way of talking about that experience, about how it rusts through your body. To rust the bedframe, I used a lot of salt and surprisingly enough, vinegar. I worked on this piece for quite a few weeks, simply watching it and moving it around every day. I realised, as I worked on the piece, that faces had begun to appear in the alchemy of the work. That was very confronting. I was very frightened by what I saw because a lot of the damage that was done was by some of those faces that appeared to me. There was fear inside me to speak about these things that are intolerable, to stand up, walk a mile in my shoes, to not be silenced anymore.
The marks and the objects left on the fabric are all very random, because my life was very random since I left home at 16. I was arrested, beaten and locked up for being gay, for being who I am, at 17, at the first Mardi Gras in 1978. So, this piece speaks also to that brutality, placed on a young woman who had already been through so much.
Salt also represents the salt water where I did all my healing and was the safest place in the world. It’s like the mother’s womb; it’s just safe. I’ve added the seashells that I used to love because they’d take my mind off things. They’d give me a sense of a different safer home. The shells are part of seeking refuge.
So, for me creating this artwork has been bigger than I thought it would be, and I let it be, and what came out was really my identity and growing up as a woman
Now I stand here, proud woman I am, and I’m not so afraid anymore. I don’t want to not talk about the difficult things in our lives because I know I’m giving women, and the next generation of women, an opportunity to speak up for ourselves, openly. To stand up and say, this will not happen again.’
- Fiona