Weaving time, spinning spine | Cecilia Fiona

Fiona’s unique technique for painting uses rabbit skin glue mixed with handmade and natural pigments, applied to the canvas with a small, thin brush. This meticulousness means that her work is full of detailed, complex compositions, blending figures and landscapes into one another creating a state of flow and tumult on the canvas dissolving the boundaries between bodies and the world.

Fiona’s new series of paintings create dreamlike landscapes that depict androgynous figures, blossoming flowers, and bizarre panoramas full of chaos and magic. These works incorporate a richer colour palette that moves away from a previous semi-translucent, dusty finish, to a darker and bolder canvas, echoing the more detailed observations of fantastical worlds and the macro- and microcosms of the universe.

Finding influence within complex areas of scientific study including quantum physics and string theory, Fiona visualises the construction and connection of the world through the invisible and how this influences our relationship to what we can see. The work ‘Weaving time, spinning spine’ (2023) shows a spine running through the canvas with nerves connecting fields of existence together, using the body as an analogy for a universe full of biomes and micro organisms; an ecosystem seemingly invisible yet teeming with life.

Fiona further explores the permeation of energy between inner and outer worlds in the work ‘Curled branches, gates unlocked’ (2023), depicting winged figures flowing through portals and nerve like fibres wrapping around to form the shape of a shell. Fiona’s compositions explode with the excitement of a bustling cosmos of beings both macroscopic and microscopic. This new body of paintings further examines the constructions of reality through the invisible forces of energy. ‘Answers from angels (look at the old, look at the young, look at our shrine, look at our time)’ (2023) interpolates forms of the organs of a flower alongside images of winged angels moving within a world brimming with flowing lines of energy, connecting beings physically and temporally with the fabric of the past, present, and future of the universe.

Alongside her wall-based paintings, Fiona expands her work into the 3-dimensional - with new sculptural works and painted jute canvas costumes - heightening the viewer’s experience of the mythical worlds she creates. An improvised, durational, and silent performance takes place in the space at moments throughout the exhibition. The costumed performers interact in the space and with the imagery in the paintings, utilising a repertoire of movements that are slow and attempt to transform into something other and to connect to the earth and the cosmos.