Fiona Waters

There’s a new kind of cafe-culture bourgeoning out of Melbourne’s inner west. The spindly black-clad hipsters of Melbourne’s north have all but been replaced by a new breed. Baby-bouncing, pedigree-dog coveting, piccolo-latte sippers, the lot of them. All vying for a table at one of the cafes on Seddon’s up-and-coming strip. The words Sour Dough are dropped around these parts more frequently than designer dog turds.
It’s one of the first bourgie cafes to have sauntered onto the doldrums of daggy old Victoria Street in the last few years. If you have ever stumbled in on a busy weekend, it’s likely you’ve been served by local artist Fiona Waters. Although you probably wouldn’t know it. Partly because you were probably hung-over, but mostly because Fiona tends to blend in.
She has, what she describes as a fairly ‘neutral’ appearance. Her sandy blonde bob is usually brushed into an unfussy side part, fashionable without being too hip. It frames her face, which is itself well proportioned, her grey-blue eyes lively but nondescript. You’ll usually see her thin frame clad in a plain white tee and a pair of high waisted black jeans and sneakers. Straight-laced, standard Melbourne fair. But when you walk into her studio it’s plain to see that there is nothing plain about Fiona Waters.
The space itself is fairly moderate. Shelves are nailed in even increments along the wall. A pair of trestle tables aligned symmetrically in the centre of the room. But the normalcy begins to dissipate here. Hoisted in the corner between the two walls are rows of fishing-line, strung sporadically with long cylindrical clay forms. They hang in energetic swoops, furls and spirals, suggesting oozing, swirling, and undulation all at once. They could be taken for faeces, genitals or bodily organs depending on how you look at them, or how dirty your mind is. They are painted in parts with henna-red and black. On the windowsill there is a mug painted like a tree with a grotesque face emerging from it. Dried banksias seem to sprout naturally from its top.
When I ask Fiona about what she’s working on she thinks for a second before blurting, “I’ve got a show in August, so I’ve mainly been doing work for that, which is like all the blobby, fingery stuff,” as she gestures towards the shapes hanging on her makeshift washing line. Fiona’s movements have a charming awkwardness to them. Her hands move in spasmodic flushes along with her rattling speech. Her thoughts chug out jerkily as though spilling from a cargo train on an uneven track. You never quite know what she’s thinking or what she’ll say next.
“It seems I’ve gotten to the point where I applied for the show almost a year ago,” she says, thoughtfully, then blurts: “It’s like when you’ve made so much stuff, and you start seeing it, and you’re just like, ‘Is this just crap and I didn’t realise it, and no one told me that I’m making rubbish?’”
I assure her she’s not. Fiona has been working towards a group show at Platform, Art Space, below Flinders Street station in Melbourne’s CBD. The space features rows of glass cases embedded along the walls of an expansive corridor. The show, opening on Friday, August the 16th, is entitled Flesh Forms.
She has been creating works, mainly in oven-baked clay for the show, while also completing black ink drawings to complement these.

Fiona’s work has evolved steadily throughout the course of her creative career. She completed her Fine Arts Degree majoring in drawing at the VCA in 2010 and has been creating and showing her work consistently ever since.
Describing her sculpting process she says, “In my mind it’s kind of an extension of drawing, where you make it and you see it right away.”
“There’s no process of having to wait for it to dry, or for it to do anything,” she says.
“Once you’ve made it you’ve made it, and you can know what it looks like and if it’s wrong you just squish it up and start again,” she says. “I don’t want to commit to something that’s really expensive.”
“Otherwise I get stressed about it and with this it’s like I can just relax and muck around with it.”
Her finished pieces always contain traces of her process.  Each curve and marking intimates some secret detail of her tactile exploration, which in itself is essential to her process. She doesn’t do any practice sketches or preparation, unless she is taking on a larger project.
“When I’m doing something like the clay thing I kind of just start squishing it around and seeing what happens,” she says, rubbing her long fingers together as she speaks. “With the clay, you start squeezing it and you don’t even realise that there’s a shape that you like.”
And so her works maintain that improvised joy. The forms seem to have emerged independently from the clay. You can imagine each of them wriggling their way blindly out, determined to take on squiggly inner-lives all their own.
“I think all the clay work that I’ve done is derivative of the body or something fleshy,” she says. “Like human waste or the body.”
“It makes sense, that you can squeeze it and then there’s your palm print in it,” she says.
This anthropomorphic quality enters most of Fiona’s work. The objects she collects, and those she creates all seem to be imbued with a kind of imagined consciousness, a human identity which is partly instilled through Fiona’s touch and partly through the innate qualities materials she manipulates. There is a sense of empathy in the way she treats and assembles her creations, both as part of herself and as distinct entities. The nurturing that goes into them is palpable.
Fiona also produces a great deal of illustrations, working primarily in ink. These drawings have a similar character to her clay work.
She says, “I’ll do a drawing, and then in some way the ink will react with the paper.” Her work is influenced through her experimentation with materials, where error and ingenuity in equal measure enter into the final product.
“I’ll do one drawing that’s almost like the trial, and the first one might be a bit crappy and then I get on a run with a collection of things,” she says. Her paper works are hung intermittently around the studio space, arranged into little groupings. There are some sausages, and a lot of hands.
“I guess most of the work is about collections of things. I think with everything I’ve made, it’s about bringing small groups of things together,” she says.

Fiona is also a compulsive collector. She refers to herself less charitably as a ‘huge hoarder.’ Her house is full of small knickknacks and weird artefacts. As she grew up her mother also collected knickknacks and crockery, taking her along to rummage through 2 Dollar Shops and op shops around Footscray. “It’s like I’ve been bred to do this,” she says.
“I collect things that are ugly, or things that are one-offs,” she says. “So I have single salt and pepper shakers.”
“I like the idea of collecting all the sad things that are by themselves and that are a bit crappy or things that are home-made and then being like ‘It’s alright, you’re in a gang now,’” she laughs. A partially humorous, and decidedly manic maternal sensibility guides her practice. She seems wants to take in all the socially invisible junk of the world, the rubbish and the litter, under her wing.
The bizarre logic that influences the acquisition of stock in these stores fascinates Fiona. That such a proliferation and pooling of unthinkably useless and redundant objects occurs compels her to contemplate each object and wonder, “why has this thing been brainstormed and then made and then packaged?” she says.
“And then someone’s thought, ‘I will buy this from wherever, and I will ship it to Footscray and I’ll sell this,’” she says.
“Why has this gone from someone’s brain to actually being a thing?” she asks, her voice equal parts incredulous and amused. The discarded objects are symptomatic of a larger culture of disposability, wherein trends are created on a whim, and patented into cheap commercial objects only to be forgotten moments later. The op shop, and the 2 dollar shop are museums for all these tiny relics of forgotten human hubris. They are like our base animal instincts, unnecessary and cringe-inducing, especially when seen on such a scale. With most of these things “It’s fucked,” she says. “But also I will take one of every colour.”
The aesthetic of her studio seems to be influenced by these decrepit commercial spaces. Clay coils in different colours jam the shelves, arranged with the scatterbrained aesthetic logic of a junk store. You can almost imagine them gathering dust.
She is interested in observing and documenting objects which “are odd without them meaning to be odd.”
“I’ve been also collecting photos of things that I’ve found on the ground around the place,” she says.
“Like a bit plait of hair on the floor and a sausage and half a banana and a piece of sweaty cheese,” she says. “It’s something gross that you recognise but that’s also funny.”
She is interested in materials generally considered abject and disgusting by most people. To Fiona, these materials have an overlooked beauty and value. Once they are removed from the hands of the owner they evolve, take on a life outside of the pragmatic intention originally ordained for them, they become strangely repulsive to us. Out of context, they no longer hold the purpose which they once had, and are to be ignored, or to be thought on only momentarily by the passerby; “Ughhh, who dropped their piece of Strasbourg here?”
The contrast interests her, that she will see the same object and have an opposite urge. She is compelled to photograph, to preserve, and to celebrate these forgotten and irrelevant fragments of banal human experience.

Fiona’s practice is now absolutely her own. But when she completed her degree, she worried she might lack a clear artistic vision, when compared to her peers.
“Everyone else had this trajectory with their work and you could see the connection,” she says, while she felt she had a different theme each year.
Finally, she realised, that the universal theme of her work was ‘imitation.’
When she wrote her proposal for the Platform show she realised that all the vocabulary that kept recurring, words like “Mimicry, imitation, copying, mocking,” were analogous with this concept.
Before that, she felt lost, thinking, “Here I am mucking around with clay making poo,” she says, and then laughs. “This is crappy.”
The work she made at University did have some personal value for her. However she felt that due to the constant pressure of presenting at critiques, the things she made became too encumbered by theory. They were “too serious.”
But her current work achieves a balance between wry humour, innuendo and child-like naivety. Much like Fiona herself. It is, she says “my life as well as my work.”
In university she made a conscious division between her “serious and intense work,” and her “regular life.” “It didn’t make sense to separate them and I was.” Her current practice, she feels, more closely approximates her inner world.
And with this new take on her practice she has finally “got the enjoyment back into it,” for the first time since she started University. Now, she says, “I just draw to draw and I’m not worried about the outcome.”
She is; however, glad to be making things with the knowledge that they have a purpose on top of her day-to-day obsession; that she is working towards a show.
“I know I’m not just making lots of poo-shaped things to have them in a weird stash in my house,” she says.
While she says, some people pester her about her future plans for a ‘real job,’ besides café work since she has finished University, her parents have been fairly supportive.
“My mum went to a high school when she was in the UK which really pushed for doing sciences. She did a biomedical science degree and hated it and wished she’d gone to art school,” she says. Her mother now gets her “creative outlet,” through quilting and doing craft courses.
“So she’s’ got a connection to it or wishes she had it,” she says. “I think she’s just happy that we’ve been allowed to do it.”
Fiona refers to herself and her younger sister, Lois, who is also an artist. She is undertaking a Fine Art Degree majoring in drawing at the VCA.
Growing up Fiona was a quiet child, who didn’t like sports, and was always more interested in being inside and drawing. She and Lois spent a lot of their childhood together playing, but the playing always had some kind of artistic element.
“If we were playing with dolls, we’d make the dolls draw each other,” she says. “It’s always been a thing.”

Fiona’s range of materials has been limited partly due to economic constraints. However, she is also concerned to make her work necessarily ambiguous, and to avoid overstepping the boundary from creating light-heartedly lewd objects to more overtly sexually explicit pieces. This has made her hesitant to experiment with “casting in different materials that have different textures which aren’t as hard,” like latex, even if she does have an interest in these materials.
“Doing that it would be hard to actually not have it just be lots and lots of dildos,” she says.
“I feel like at least with this kind of material that I’m using it’s cheap and hard and pretty simplistic and that’s where it’s staying away from just making weird sex toys.”
“The first things I made in this series were blobs with beads stuck in them,” she says. “I made a necklace for a friend and I needed a chain, so I just bought a necklace from one of the two dollar shops in Footscray and cut the chains off and had to cut all the beads off. So I just had all these beads.”
She spent a whole day alone making the clay forms and was unsure about what she had produced.
“Then my friend came over and said ‘What are you making sex toys now Fiona? Is this your thing now?’” she says. And while it was something she was uncomfortable with at first, she now embraces the multiplicity of interpretations her works offers, and what these reveal to her about her own practice.
“I have come to realise that all the images I was drawn to collecting were all things that are like flesh, or things that look like other things, or things that look a little bit rude but also could be construed as not being rude,” she says.
“And it’s kind of an offshoot of that,” she says.
Her work seems to always straddles this line, to be necessarily and consciously in between interpretative frames. She has begun to embrace the ambiguity, and to have less anxiety about her practice being labelled in any particular way. “I’m kind of into people thinking “That’s obviously a penis, or that’s obviously a tongue but other people might see it and think, “well that’s a funny blobby shape.”

Fiona is very involved in the contemporary art scene in Melbourne, with a strong social group of fellow artists. She attends galleries and ARI’s regularly to see the work of emerging young artists like herself.
Generally, she sees a lot of work that she really likes, “where it’s something really simple or something resting on something,” or when she likes the way something has been put together, or the way objects have been assembled.”
But, she says, “a lot of art that I’ve seen around, I think ‘anybody could have made this.’”
And that’s the thing she doesn’t like, that the work can be “cold and emotionless,” and can “not have any of the person in it.”
“I think that’s the thing I like the most about work, is seeing it and learning a bit about the person,” she says. “Even if it’s something stupid or something funny like realising that there’s a certain texture they like or a certain colour scheme that they always use.”
“I think that’s what I find lovely. I like seeing someone’s work, and knowing that you’re seeing a part of them,” she says. “It’s like they’re letting you in on a bit of themselves.”
I ask Fiona what she thinks her work says about her. She laughs, and thinks for a while, before blurting again.
“I guess I find that to a lot of people that aren’t my friends I seem pretty neutral- not neutral exactly but they don’t think I’m a big freak,” she says.
“People that are friends of mine now, when they talk to me about when they first met me, they tell me, ‘I just didn’t realise that you’re as mad as you are’,” she says. Her work has a similar effect; one of slow, bemusing discovery, with no defined end point. Her work, and Fiona herself, never reveal their true nature entirely, although there are hints.
“I have a feeling that that’s what my work is, where people see it and they think, ‘Oh yeah, it’s just some little clay things and a few drawings,’ and the closer they get the more they think ‘Arrrgh,” what is that?’”
“I kind of like that,” she says. She leans toward me, her small blue eyes taking on a burning intensity as her voice grows low and fast. “If you chat to me you realise I’m a bit weird, and if you don’t then it’s like you’re missing out because I’m crazy.”

 

Fiona’s show, Flesh Forms, opens at Platform Art Spaces on the 16th of August at 6pm. You can see more of her work here.