STORY OF FIA | VISUAL ARTIST

I make drawings, sculptures, installations and monumental digital prints. An important recurring aspect in my work is the metamorphosis. I like to introduce a natural element in the work that goes beyond my control. Like in the series of my work where I introduced living spiders to weave webs around my sculptures- for example in the work ‘The Great Indoors’. It could be described as a hybrid of a museum showcase and a lab/terrarium: positioned inside the vitrine there is a bough with golden geometric structures attached at the ends of its branches. This showcase serves as a habitat for a house spider which is expected to spin its webs around the geometric forms and thus become part of the artwork. While introducing an element of chance, the piece blurs the boundaries between art, experimental “test arrangements” and nature. Raising questions as: how artificial is our perception of nature and how natural is culture?

An inspiring concept is “the Marvellous” as described by art historian Hal Foster: “A state at once otherwordly, secular and psychic”. I seek to achieve a sort of re-enchantment of a disenchanted world. I guess it stems from living in an urban environment, an artificial state in which every natural event becomes a phenomenon. By introducing a living species to an otherwise static work of art, it becomes a dynamic piece; it’s like adding the magic ingredient, it’s a sort of alchemy. I can never completely foresee what the outcome will be, there’s always a chance of failure, but the process is the most important element, the metamorphosis.

In more recent works I experimented with growing crystals on my sculptures by making mixtures of different kinds of salts and chemicals. Here you can watch a video of the crystallization.