Primarily a printmaker, Fiona Pole has over a number of years managed to capture the attention of the art world with her very personal, yet universal subject-matter and her subtly unconventional approach to the printmaking process. Simplified forms are presented in often complex spatial relationships that are echoed in the seeming ease with which she applies various traditional printmaking techniques. The ones appearing most frequently are the dress, the suit case, the bicycle, and the airplane. They are very personal symbols in her work. Not only do these form an objective correlative for the feelings Pole wants to suggest, but they also form a network of images to interpret and understand the conceptual nature of her work.
In her new body of work, Pole has added a whole new suite of symbols. They are, among others, the fox, the wolf and the bear. Pole has drawn extensively on literary works for inspiration when she made these. Chiefly, are the French fairy tales with which she became very familiar, reading them to her two children when she and her family still lived in Paris. No fewer that fifteen of the new etchings have as their subject matter, these tales. The wolf appears in many other works as well. “Children in South Africa”, she maintains, “do not really know wolves, but they hear about them in fairy tales. So, the wolf has become a veritable bogey man for them.” This inexplicable fear of the unknown is one of the many new strands Pole explores in her work. Interpreting the work, one is reminded of Claude Levy Strauss, who once said that animals are not only good to eat; they are good to think with. And that is the strength in Pole’s new work: she provides the viewer with a new vocabulary, with new metaphors with which to think about her art.
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’École 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. Having lived in Paris for over ten years, she and her family have returned to South Africa recently. She lives and works in Johannesburg.
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