1998
Buttoned Up Gallery 19, Haymarket, Sydney Australia. Works - Buttoned Up 1 to 30, House 1 and 2 and buttoned up wallpaper. The solo exhibition Buttoned Up was made up of thirty small works, a wallpapered wall and two small sculptural objects, House 1 and 2. These works were formed at the junction where something is held and another thing is allowed to pass. For these objects the interest is in the perforations, the point of transition, the separation where noodles are kept and the water discarded, and in the ventilation of the meat safe and the security screen.
Memories are held by objects, by the buttons, colanders, steamers and furniture and become the ornamental and decorative overlayig the everyday. The traditional means of patterning such as sewing, knotting, cutting and pasting were used and locate the works in Davies’ cultural tradition.
The art critic and academic Elin Howe wrote in her essay ‘ Looking around Corners - Oblique Angles in the Work of Fiona Davies’ about these works that - ‘In a series of wall pieces constructed from discarded cooking implements and small often mother of pearl buttons Davies married two mundane motifs in an aberrant union. Bristling from the holes of aluminum colanders, strainers and steaming baskets was a regiment of tiny buttons. Their unnatural upright pose and gleaming spit and polish appearance spoke of colonialist order carved out of the newly found exotic resources. The unassuming physical appearance of these objects was, however, disrupted by the accompanying conceptual implication. Now discredited in the first world as health hazards, aluminum cooking implements are fast becoming signifiers of the third world. ‘Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
