Archive images - more to be added
FIONA SARISON
The fictional archival project started in 2013 with the Showroom Gallery and RCA curating class - ongoing.
Fiona Sarison's influential art practice defies easy classification. Celebrated in the late 70s and 80s as an avant-garde performer and writer, she also worked in film, video, collage, print and design. Sarison was an iconoclastic builder and manipulator of mass-produced items; she used an intuitive logic to purposefully transform the image or objects into underlying social concerns that related to Fiona Sarison's daily experience of life.
She developed these manipulations into an idiosyncratic meditative performance style that was slow-paced and conceptually uncouth.
The culminating tableaux, featuring Sarison and disassembled or repurposed objects, evoke, and Samuel Beckett. Sarison was born in Rosedale, Toronto, Canada. in 1964 Fiona completed her Bachelor of Cinema Studies, This was followed by four years at the Slade School of Fine Art where she became close friends with the filmaker Derek Jarman and the Printer Dorothea Wight. (In the late 70s Sarison developed a unique performance style that combined the influence of Thellusson theology contemporary dance and performance art. Remaining outside of anyone artistic identity, Sarison considered her work to be a performative madcap celebration of esoteric identity of the object.
In addition to writing 'White Space' Publications 1976/77- 88, Sarison was interested in working with emotional expression as objects, and vice versa. Exemplify-ing the cross-pollination of influences in her work, she referred
to her performances as animated miniature film shows. Characteristically taking the form of Soundings as she called them, these performances were usually short in duration;
a matter of minutes and involved a dead-pan manipulation
of simple everyday objects and her own prints totell a lost narrative, often over a small yellow kitchen table. From 1978 to 1989 Fiona taught Fine Art printing at the Lanchester Polytechnic (now Coventry University), this was seen as her most productive period of printed matter. Fiona ran several notable performance and print workshops, but sadly it was also a period of a slow withdrawal from her involvement and creative participation with her own London circle with her final London show (COlOUR ME IN!) at the ACME SPACE
in 1982, And a Performative print workshop which she ran every August at John Latham Studio from
1985-1987.
Publicaton archive images - more to be added
Dorothea Wight's studio in Kentish Town where Fiona wrote and printed the first two editions of 'White Space'.
Fiona Sarison
Collages 1972 - 77 (poster)
