Heartland I Handlines

15 August - 12 September 2009

Exhibition catalogue available

 

Fiona Pole will facilitate linoleum printmaking workshops with schools in the local community, which will culminate in a steamroller printing morning at 44 Stanley Avenue on Saturday 12 September at 11:00

 

In an exhibition at GALLERY AOP entitled Heartland I Handlines Fiona Pole is showing new prints, drawings and watercolours. Primarily a printmaker, she has over a number of years managed to capture the attention with her very personal, yet universal subject-matter and her subtly unconventional approach to the printmaking medium. Simplified forms are presented in often complex spatial relationships that are echoed in the seeming ease with which she applies various traditional printmaking techniques.

 

Fiona Pole remarks that “the hand lines in the title [of the exhibition] come from the etched lines in our hands, which are said to have significance in the determining of our future.” A similar ‘significance’ can be obtained by looking at Pole’s art: she inadvertently uses many lines, grids, patterns, and maps in a series of etchings called Packing Up.

 

Pole’s art provides the reader with various clues and symbols to decipher her work. The ones appearing most frequently are the dress, the bicycle, the suit case, and the aeroplane.  Not only do these form an objective correlative for the feelings Pole wants to suggest in departing, or arriving, but they also form a network of images to interpret and understand the conceptual nature of her work. Says Pole, “The objects that represent home, the journeys both physical and metaphysical that take you away from home, the things you leave behind and the things that get taken along with you are important threads in this body of work.”

 

She carefully crafts a ‘self’ by simultaneously disclosing, inventing, transcending and epitomizing biography. She creates her ‘self’ mainly through clothing and body posture, but she might as well have done so through the usual range of self signifiers such as hairstyle, cosmetics, tattoos, piercing, body shaping, or the more radical use of body hormones, plastic surgery, or through digital imaging, and cybernetic communication devises allowing artists to disembody, and construct an identity on the internet. She, however, invents her ‘self’ through creative ingenuity, not by obvious fictitious means, or sly deception. There is a playful solemnity in her work. For some artists ‘self’ knowledge is sometimes discovered through the process of creating art. For others, establishing ‘self’ is a prerequisite for creation. Fiona Pole generates as much knowledge about herself and her world in and through her art, as she asserts her artistic self in and through these works.*

 

Short biography

Fiona Pole was born in 1974 in Benoni, South Africa. She studied at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa,  where she obtained a BA Fine Arts (Honours) degree in 1996. In 2002 she graduated from the l’Ecole Superieure Estienne, Paris, France with a mention of excellence in her work. She specializes in printmaking and has had a number of exhibitions in South Africa and abroad. She lives and works in Paris, but returns regularly to her country of birth.

 

*Text adapted from catalogue essay by Wilhelm van  Rensburg