Fiona is one of a number of artists in their thirties who no longer live in New Zealand but who have kept close relationships with the country and still have regular dealer gallery shows. In this case Fiona has been in Auckland for a few weeks and made the work there continuing her recasting of architecture into new contexts and delivering visual jolts to that inattentive part of the brain that deals in spatial memory. We were able to visit Fiona while she was making this show and have put up some images of her in a temporary studio on OTNSTUDIO. The studio in this case was carved out of a warehouse that once stored goods before they were shipped out to the Pacific Islands. The evocative location signs are still nailed to the walls, Vanuatu, Raro, Suva. The other two artists now on the site are also working in warehouse spaces. Oscar Enberg, like Fiona, works in a space cut out of a store (his filled with boxes of ukuleles) among other goods. Across town in Henderson Andrew Beck shares his warehouse space with two other artists and has also converted a small unit into a darkroom for developing prints and making his photograms.
Image: old sign from earlier times in Fiona Connor's temporary Auckland studio
