1998
Buttoned Up Gallery 19, Haymarket, Sydney Australia. Works - Buttoned Up 1 to 30, House 1 and 2 and buttoned up wallpaper.
Make it stand out
The art critic and academic Elin Howe wrote in her essay ‘ Looking around Corners - Oblique Angles in the Work of Fiona Davies’ about these works that - ‘In a series of wall pieces constructed from discarded cooking implements and small often mother of pearl buttons Davies married two mundane motifs in an aberrant union. Bristling from the holes of aluminum colanders, strainers and steaming baskets was a regiment of tiny buttons. Their unnatural upright pose and gleaming spit and polish appearance spoke of colonialist order carved out of the newly found exotic resources. The unassuming physical appearance of these objects was, however, disrupted by the accompanying conceptual implication. Now discredited in the first world as health hazards, aluminum cooking implements are fast becoming signifiers of the third world. ‘Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
