Not Shouting Asking, a new body of works on paper and participatory installation by Fiona Gavino that aims to seek beauty in truth. The texted based prints are a loose intersection between traditional broadsheet headlines, idioms and improvised protest banners of the streets. The prints are made by first harvesting the plant fibre, curing the long strappy leaves, followed by weaving a suite of handwoven letters. Arranged into words and phrases this unique analogue font the artist calls Bad Ass Caña, are inked up and ran through the press. The phrases presented are hunted, gathered and collected across numerous platforms – inter-culturally and internationally, digitally and through everyday conversations with anybody. Gavino believes we are living in revolutionary times and she invites the viewer to be an active participant. The objective being to broaden the conversation, reimagine structural norms, allow new narratives to the mainstream discourse, challenge injustices and recenter the debate transmitting revolutionary hope through aesthetics. 

Gallery goers are invited to challenge and reimagine the current dominant social narrative, to create their own words and phrases with the woven letters installed in the exhibition space to take a photo and upload it to their own social media accounts with the hashtag #BadAssCaña. The Bad Ass Caña hashtag can then be searched up by anyone resulting in the cultivation of new community networks with the aim to build solidarity and facilitate a stronger community of artivists.

“Hello I am a stain – I am the last person to carry my family name, through my arts practice I am able to celebrate and pay homage to my heritage which informs my voice and through this I resist removal.” 

 

With Australian, Filipino, and Maori heritage Fiona Gavino has been described as an intercultural artist working the traditional into the contemporary. Born in Brisbane (QLD) and growing into adulthood in the NT, where she was adopted into a Yolgnu family, this artist has a unique decolonised lens in which to examine socio-cultural and political Australia. Graduating with a Bachelor of Visual Arts from Charles Darwin University in 2006 she now lives and works in Fremantle. Gavino strives to use basket making materials and techniques in new and innovative ways to create sculpture, installation, video and printmaking. With basketry as the foundation to her practice there is an undeniable crafted aesthetic to her work but through the artist’s attentive conceptual ideas and intercultural dialogues she has placed her practice in a more expansive realm. As an artist she pushes the boundaries of what basketry can physically do and say as she continues to seek to engage with the broad spectrum of social, political and environmental challenges of contemporary society.