Fio Adamson

I love the quirky and the random. I go around the world experiencing the harmony and shock of combinations and contrasts: of forms and materials, of scale; of made by nature and made by humans. Nature is important, swimming in cold water is vital. Visual and full body experiences are translated into predominantly 3D pieces.

So there is passion in my work. I work individually or with others in my local community. I sculpt wood and layer tissue paper; I draw with thick graphite sticks, and smudge and erase, or I knit fine wires; I stitch metallic threads into sheets of polythene; I use found and recycled objects and materials, or bones, or bolts. Sometimes I collage. I take photographs.

As far as possible I emulate contrasts of scale. I admire Gabriel Orozco’s Dark Leviathan (a whole whale skeleton drawn all over with black circles) and his Mixiotes (a flight of dried cactus leaves, rubber balls and fine polythene); I love the quirky vitrines of Rebecca Warren, her angular sheets of hard metal, her random little fluffy pompoms, as much as the contrasts with her large lumpy clay people.

My own work has become predominantly playful. It draws on my personal experience as a girl and a woman and, like so many women, my life has been unexpectedly challenging. For many years I focused on the tragic elements, and memory and loss are still the starting point. However I now find myself taking it down a lighter route. Enjoy!