FIONA HALL
Artist Profile visited Fiona Hall in Hobart as she was preparing a new work for the inaugural Bangkok Art Biennale later this year. Known for her multi-media installations featuring a variety of hand-honed materials, the artist is focusing her energies on the fraught subject of war, and how it has always been a part of the human condition.
FIONA HALL IS STANDING IN A STUDIO FULL OF broken bottles that open out into a winter garden. The earth is stubbled with dormant bulbs and the water beyond looks cold. Her materials within this space are ordinary yet menacing. Shards of green and sepia glass have been painted with chalky oil paint to outline the shattered bones of skeletons and the glass lies on the floor in a formation that you swiftly realise is meant to summon a mass grave.
(2018) is a new work that Hall is preparing for the Bangkok Biennale, which opens on 19 October, 2018. Under considerable pressure and spread across no less than three international projects this year alone, I ask her if she needs help (2017) but it also testifies to the interdependence between broad concept and lean resource. And the importance of her own touch.
