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Fiona Foley’s installation slices through these charmed circles; her works dissect and expose the facts, fantasies and frauds, they force us to look into the abyss of our imaginings; and, finally, they thrust us out into expanding frontiers of human relationship where we encounter ever more uncertainties.1
In ‘Sea of Love’, the most recent body of work from Fiona Foley, the artist explores the sexual undercurrent that has interlaced much of her work over the past two decades. While Foley works across painting, installation and sculpture, it is with photography that she habitually tackles different styles of artistic opportunity. This time sex is writ large, yet not in the pithy and confrontational sense seen in her Red Ochre Me (2006), a major installation which included sculptural elements, photographs and two dimensional objects like printed blankets and bags. These new photographs are romantic, muted, laced perhaps even more dangerously with beauty and subtlety; a series of images which works powerfully on the psyche of the viewer.
Foley’s work has delved deep into her Aboriginal ancestry and identity, and mined Queensland history for its casual and often deadly treatment of her indigenous forebears. Hidden histories, but also her own evolving identity and observations of contemporary culture, treated with a cutting political edge, are her stock in trade. Titles of some of these earlier works which have looked at sexuality both now and historically—Stud gins, 2003, Sacred cunt juice, 2003 and Why do they hate us, 2005—have been confrontational and angry. Yet this work, while drawing strength from those ongoing themes, looks visibly different and represents a more memoir-ising period from Foley.
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