spring 2023

In this work there is no meaningful distinction between the imagined and the real. The pieces talk about mythologies in the same way they speak about the gesture of a hand, or the sensation of food moving through your digestive tract. They allow for the proximity of things: the visceral and the Erotic, physical and metaphysical, pleasure and pain.

The materials I work with remind me of the physical experience of being. The watercolor paint is like my bodily fluids, while wool is a fiber not so different from my own hair. I pour paint onto the paper with force and it splatters in undesirable places, reminding me of a jet of urine splashing against the ground and onto my shoe. Piss, blood, saliva, cum: unwieldy things made wieldy. I root wool into the surface, changing the object, allowing paper to become skin.

The material story becomes a statement about the primacy of physicality. It seems to me that if I have access to higher/deeper forms of knowing/being, it is because of my clitoris, my hands, my belly, not despite them. What emerges is a formal treatment of the body that has more to do with having/being/knowing one, rather than depicting one.

My arms extend around and in, fingers grasping at an unexpected organ. I give my fluorescent stomach a good squeeze, like a hug.

- Fio