Fiona Van Oyen
Shared Lines: Pūtahitanga exhibiting artist
Navigation Lines (2018-2019) 1690x1235x85mm
b. 1957, Christchurch, New Zealand.
2017 Master’s in Fine Arts, with distinction, Dunedin School of Art.
1981 Diploma in Fine Arts (Printmaking), University of Canterbury.
The loss of many buildings and places after the series of earthquakes in Christchurch and Canterbury from 2010-11, destroyed many landmarks that had become signifiers of place, events and a knowingness we experience in belonging to place. We have all experienced how standing in open spaces that were once built up landmarks, can arouse sensations of uncanniness (literally ‘unhomeliness’ or ‘not of home’), or not belonging, while at the same time play with our sense of our own physical scale in relation to place.
It is these experiences that motivate my choice of materials and the signs and symbols I use. I am interested in creating works that activate the haptic – the sense of touch without fingertip touching or the phenomenological and ontological responses one feels in one’s body when looking at something or when standing on the land or in a place.
An ambiguity in symbolism – is it anatomical (of the body) or is it of the land, is something I often employ as a way of communicating we are of the land, while at the same time reacquainting myself with and forming new relationships to new old places.
