Contemporary Australia: Women

81 Fiona Hall Australia b.1953 Fly away home (detail) 2012 Bird nests courtesy of the Queensland Museum, paper, pencils, wallpaper, timber, MDF board, US dollars, glass Installed dimensions variable For over a decade, staff at the Queensland Art Gallery have worked with contemporary artists to create art works and installations exploring the inspiration and ideas behind artists’ works, with a very specific audience in mind — children. Reflecting on issues of the twenty-first century, Fiona Hall has created Fly away home , a large-scale installation drawing connections between the migratory behaviour of birds and people. In a forest environment lined with wallpaper depicting Sri Lankan birds and military camouflage, children and families are invited to create their own species of birds and to build nests for them from shredded newspaper. Once complete, children classify their birds and take them home, or place them in the Fly away home environment in the Gallery space. Fly away home was developed with the same meticulous detail and conceptual rigour as any of Hall’s works. As an experience for children, the installation not only opens young imaginations to the wonders of the world inhabited by birds and humans, it also sheds light on some of the complexities involved in Hall’s role as a creator of art for young audiences. Since the late 1990s, your work has responded to contemporary political and social issues. Would you like to outline some of the issues underlying Fly away home ? Fly away home responds to my growing concern with the widening gap between nature and culture. The project is an offshoot of Tender , a work I made in 2003–06, which is now in the Queensland Art Gallery Collection. In Tender , I attempted to find a visual way to comment on how at odds with each other our global ecosystems and our increasingly globalised world of commerce actually are. This is, for me, beyond all our other wars, the immense battlefield of our era. Fly away home brings together these two opposing realms to try to show young visitors just how interconnected we are with the natural world — that we are part of it. The sentiments of nurture and protection — the major elements of Tender — are there in the nest‑making component of this new project, and there are also references to the parallel migratory behaviour of birds and humans. We share so much in common with our kindred species. Your works When my boat comes in 2003–06, Leaf litter 1999–2003, Cash crop 1998 and, of course, Tender 2003–06 explore the history of trade and economics and the resulting connections with the natural world. For Fly away home , you have created a set of colourful banknotes for the fictitious nation called The Republic of the Birds. Children are curious about money and are aware of its value early in life, so why did you want to challenge them to use banknotes in different ways? Kids these days grow up in a world that seems to be almost entirely ruled by monetary values, in which financial status appears to be closely linked to a state of inner happiness. It’s hard, against the all-pervading power of money, to find convincing ways to present an alternative perspective. Children are likely to get the joke and irony of money for birds — if not the idea of a republic — and maybe also understand that birds, and the rest of nature, belong to a realm where money has no currency. Fly away home is lined with wallpaper depicting Sri Lankan birds against a background of military camouflage — imagery you often turn to in your practice. What is the significance of the camouflage pattern? Camouflage is an evolutionary idea in nature which has been commandeered by modern warfare. In very recent times, military camouflage patterning has infiltrated the world of fashion — bizarre. However, military ‘camo’ patterns are beautiful in their way — the ‘leopard print’ of our era perhaps — and are signifiers of the blurred border between political and popular culture. I started to consider camouflage patterning during my first visit to Sri Lanka in 1999; the wallpaper camo pattern in the Fly away home installation is the Tamil Tiger’s ‘tiger stripe’ combined with images of Sri Lankan bird species. The video screened on one wall of the installation was shot in Sri Lanka at Lunuganga, the country estate of the late architect Geoffrey Bawa. Fiona Hall An interview with Fiona Hall Fly away home