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
Tags: doors, white (color), windows
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- 21 July 2024)
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
[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)
Related reading: Above Ground
Notes
The Places We Belong To
Cycling into work along Ferry Road each morning I pass one of those new ads perkily announcing that 'The Christchurch We Love is Still Here'. And each morning I imagine getting off the bike and performing a firm correction. Something along the lines of, 'The Christchurch we love is still here, but some very big bits of it are being knocked down.'
Notes
Inside job
The view from inside the walls in the De-Building spaces, with holes cut and waiting for the arrival of Fiona Connor's installation of facsimile domestic windows, What you bring with you to work.
Notes
Yertle the Turtle by Glen Hayward
This article first appeared in The Press as 'An Ode to Yertle the Turtle' on 13 May 2015.
Notes
Louise Henderson, Addington Workshops
For many years, the piercing whistle of the railway workshops off Blenheim Road was Addington's alarm clock.
Notes
New exhibition: Shifting Lines
Here's a little from behind the scenes. Shifting Lines opens tomorrow, 9 November, and runs until 19 January 2014. It's a show about drawing as an idea, which is permitted here to take very different forms. It includes work by six artists – Andrew Beck, Peter Trevelyan, Katie Thomas, Pip Culbert, Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano – all of whom use line to investigate space and structure in unexpected ways.
Notes
Rooftops, backyards, urban scapes
As a supplement to the article in today's Press GO section, highlighting the recent purchase of Ivy Fife's Untitled (Towards Worcester Street from St. Elmo Courts), here's a modest selection of paintings of rooftops, backyards and urban scapes from the collection...
Notes
The Queen's visit by Ivy Fife
This article first appeared as 'Hello and goodbye' in The Press on 5 October 2012.
Notes
Factory at Widnes by L.S. Lowry
This article first appeared in The Press on 13 October 2004
Laurence Stephen Lowry painted Factory at Widnes in 1956, at which time he was Britain's most famous living painter. Lowry's fame increased in that year as he became the subject of a BBC television documentary, though his work had already been popular in British homes and schools as reproductions since the end of the war. If appreciation for his individualistic painting style was widespread, there was also fascination with L.S. Lowry the artist, who had projected in the press the image of a lonely recluse.
Commentary
Above Ground
I go into the Gallery. Haven’t been there in a while. Building closed. It was open to begin with. Civil Defence HQ in the weeks following the shock that laid the city low and who knew glass could be so strong, so resilient? Then the Gallery closed. It was cordoned off, behind wire netting. Something was going on in there. Someone said something had cracked in the basement. Someone said they needed to insert a layer of bouncy forgiving rubber beneath glass and concrete, ready for any future slapdown.
Commentary
City of Shadows and Stories
If cities are the ground into which we plant stories, the soil of Ōtautahi – later Christchurch – is undergoing a protracted tilling season. Five years is a long unsettlement in human terms; on a geological (or indeed narratological) scale, time moves more gradually. Christchurch exists today as a rich aggregation of narratives, propping up physical edifices of crumbling stone and cardboard.
Article
Shifting Lines
It's where we live: the encrusted surface of a molten planet, rotating on its own axis, circling round the star that gives our daylight. Geographically, it's a mapped-out city at the edge of a plain, bordered by sea and rising, broken geological features. Zooming in further, it's a neighbourhood, a street, a shelter – all things existing at first as outlines, drawings, plans. And it's a body: portable abode of mind, spirit, psyche (however we choose to view these things); the breathing physical location of unique identity and passage.
Article
De-Building
For many passers-by, Christchurch art Gallery is identified by its dramatic glass façade—the public face it presents to the world. but De-Building is an exhibition that offers a very different view. bringing together the work of fourteen artists from new Zealand and farther afield, this group exhibition draws inspiration from the working spaces gallery-goers seldom see: the workshops, loading bays and back corridors; the scruffy, half-defined zones.