Open Frequency
Open Frequency is a curated online programme presenting new developments in contemporary art. Selected artists are nominated by key curators, writers and artists from across the UK. Recently profiled Scotland-based artists include Katy Dove, Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan, Camilla Low, Toby Paterson and Hayley Tompkins.
Open Frequency is a programme area of Axis, the arts council funded leading online resource for the contemporary art community.
An artist and writer, Fiona Jardine often works in dialogue with her previous works – referring back, incorporating them, or working in series – and in dialogue with other artists.
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Many recent projects have resulted from collaborations, often making works in response to the artist she is showing with, reflecting the drama and tension between support and contextualisation. |
In this vein, she has worked with the French artist Lili Reynaud-Dewar at Public, Paris and Scottish artists Katy Dove and Michael Mallet at Glasgow Project Room.
Sweeney
Fiona's installations draw upon a range of literary and art historical sources, most notably with references to early Modernist writers and sculptors - T.S. Eliot (his poem 'The Waste Land' and poetic drama 'Sweeney Agonistes'), Rodin's The Gates of Hell and Giacometti's 'Woman with her Throat Cut' – and American post-modern painting and literature, with allusions to Robert Longo and Brett Easton Ellis.
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Sweeney, a solo project at Intermedia, Glasgow in 2005, was an installation of delicate pencil drawings and relief sculptures based on bleak and often pagan symbols derived in part from the grotesque imagery of the pre-Christian Green Man. |
The use of a type of paper pulp papier mache, which withers and shrinks as it dries, served as a metaphor for Jardine's literary interests: the process of desiccation reflecting a central motif in Eliot's work.
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'Sweeney, apeneck Sweeney, Sweeney shifting from ham to ham, is the Sweeney of T.S. Eliot's early poetry and his first dramatic excursion, 'Sweeney Agonistes', via Patricia Cornwell's Sickert fantasies, by way of Robert Longo, Brett Easton Ellis and Francis Rabelais back to Eliot's own later orthodoxy.
The journey reifies Sweeney in line with the imperatives of the 20th century only to fracture his individual identity.'
Intermedia press release, 2005. |
April is the Cruellest Month
April is the Cruellest Month was a two-person exhibition with London-based artist Will Daniels at Transmission Gallery in 2006.
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The title is taken from the first line of T. S. Eliot’s 'The Waste Land (1922) and reinforces the poetic links between both artists' practices – the production of funereal 'memorial' facades in Jardine's case, and reiterations of classics in Daniels', together with the strong material links between their work. |
These imposing relief sculptures, built from basic lo-fi materials, made liberal and loose references to Classical and arcane architectural features: a pair of funereal facades were designed with allusions to Wall Street boardrooms and ancient portals, in particular the façade to the 'Midas Monument', and Anatolian tomb chamber dating from the 8th or 9th Century B.C.
Darren Rhymes comments, 'The central sculpture is placed between the supporting columns that are a feature of Transmission Gallery – suggesting an object on the brink of architecture. It is almost tall enough to be bigger than the viewer (you can't see the top of it) yet it is not quite tall enough to assert itself and dispel the association of the body. Its surface shouts interior bodily suggestion, huge guts made from running splurts of expanding foam with a brown gloss paint finish'.
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'The pillars, an abject counterpart to the white columns of the gallery space - referencing Jardine's continued interest in the work of Francis Rabelais - seemingly take their form from 'an organisation of mollified entrails, arsepipes and larries, belying their Gargantuan origins. Resonant with their rude craft, hi-gloss and leathery, their presence in the gallery sets up an uneasy limbo, neither interior nor exterior, neither now nor then, and acts as a foil for Will Daniel's paintings.'
Transmission Gallery press release, 2006 |
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Biography
Fiona Jardine studied at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Glasgow School of Art. Since graduation she has exhibited widely throughout the UK as well as Rotterdam, Mexico City, Athens, Antwerp, New York, Paris and Montreal. She has undertaken residencies at Cove Park, Argyll and Dumbreck Marsh Art Project. This year Fiona was invited by Leisure in Montreal, a curatorial enterprise of Susannah Wesley and Meredith Carruthers, to make a new work alongside Montreal artist Lauren Nurse, and most recently to collaborate with Lisa Gallacher and Hanna Hewetson on How to do White at Tramway, Glasgow, August 2006.
Fiona lives and works in Glasgow.
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