Fiona Connor

b.1981

What you bring with you to work

  • 2010
  • Mixed media
  • Purchased 2010
  • 1680 x 2330 x 45mm
  • 2010/005.1-9

Fiona Connor is known for subtle interventions that invite us to consider how we use and inhabit different spaces. This domestic window (one of nine in a larger series) occupies both actual and imagined territory. Embedded directly into the wall, it allows rare and disconcerting access to the Gallery’s underlying structure. Fiona’s windows are also meticulously reconstructed replicas, based on the real-life bedroom windows of gallery attendants from the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, where the work was first shown. The memory of their dreams and imaginings complicates our view, as the personal oozes into the institutional.

(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- )

The photograph of this work shows it as it appeared in the exhibition De-Building, where seven of the nine windows were installed.

Exhibition History

earlier labels about this work
  • [Above ground, 18 December 2015 – 12 February 2017] (https://christchurchartgallery.org.nz/exhibitions/above-ground)

    In 2010, the ex-Auckland, Los Angeles-based Fiona Connor produced nine precise replicas of the bedroom windows of a group of art gallery attendants. Connor’s flexible installation plan sees these replica windows fitted into cavities in a building’s walls, allowing views into the fabric of its hidden structure.

    'What you bring with you to work' tests out various ideas, implicit in its title, including the imprint of a person's home environment, and the meeting of private and public space. In a local, post-earthquake context, Connor's window structures may gather a different set of associations.

    (Above ground, 2015)

  • To make these windows, Connor worked with a group of gallery attendants, creating faithful copies of their bedroom windows. The result is a series of 'private views' into the dusty landscape of the de-build, a strangely intimate space filled with evidence of the gallery's recent past. Like most new art museums, Christchurch Art Gallery is effectively a steel-and-concrete box containing a changing network of smaller plywood boxes. The Gallery's recent Ron Mueck exhibition, for instance, involved an extensive 'build' of false walls. Choosing to puncture those walls rather than take them down entirely, Connor reveals the makeshift and messy reality behind the gallery's confident appearance. (Label date unknown)