Fiona Abicare: De-pose

Fiona Abicare: De-Pose blurs the boundaries between abstraction and décor, reconfiguring the display formats which distinguish and determine sites for the presentation of art within private settings, highlighting their focus and form. Presenting the de-constructed domestic interior as a space that responds to the fashion for sport as a subject, De-Pose explores this connection in relation to the history of fine art and décor.

Referencing the classic ‘trophy pose’ – a portrait photograph, both candid and constructed – documents a ‘particular’ woman as she poses in the artist’s studio. The woman is posed next to an artwork, representing both the labour and theatre of the artist, and the ambiguous role of the sculptural object as a residue of the performed act and as a potential commodity; a site of contemplated ‘glory’.

A wall relief cast from clay abstracts a detail of Jimmy, a prized Golden Retriever (a breed historically developed as a gun dog to retrieve shot water fowl) through a performed action of repeated mark making derived from an extended in-studio archery performance. A form is found through the act of punctuating its surface, defining a field of action in its process. This form, both likeness and texture, echoes an image of Jimmy printed on silk wool and used as a ‘throw’ over a brass frame fireplace screen. 

Methodologies of game hunting and its accessories are enacted, stylized and transfigured into décor, re-defining the aesthetic of achievement and success - the trophy - through its materiality, dispersing it into an associative display of emblems and traces.