Fiona Van Oyen, is a Christchurch artist, who graduated with a Master of Fine Arts, with Distinction, from the Dunedin School of Art in 2017. Fiona originally studied at the School of Fine Art (SoFA) at Canterbury and has had three exhibitions here at The Central; ‘Landskin’ (2017), ‘Navigation Lines’ (2019), and her most recent ‘Anatomical Garden’ in 2023.
Formally trained in print making, using lino and woodcuts to produce her works; Van Oyen's eye for precision also allows her to hand-cut sheets of cotton paper, creating works either framed, floated or suspended resembling the silhouette of perhaps a fruit tree from the 'red-zone' or the retracing of space and place.
The surface tactility in many of Van Oyen’s works is important. The shimmer and slick shine of layers of ink against a certain chalkiness of paint, gesso, soot, or the grit of sand; and paper pressed flat against plumped up embossed forms. These, combined with colour combinations that have been carefully considered, have the potential to trigger the sensation of touch or the desire to touch, without fingertip touching. This is the physical haptic. Van Oyen’s attempt at replicating the sensation of being in the landscape.
Landscape, and its macrocosmic/microcosmic relationship with the body, has long been a metaphor in Van Oyen’s oeuvre. Her print, I think this is part of our garden, which won the Zonta Ashburton Female Art Award in 2017, part of Van Oyen’s Masters exhibition was inspired by her mother’s battle with Alzheimer’s disease. The exhibition Navigation Lines which showed at The Central in 2019 was inspired by the disruption to Christchurch’s cityscape caused by the Canterbury earthquakes of 2010 and 2011. (Text accompanying Anatomical Garden exhibition, Andrew Paul Wood, 2023).