Belinda Fox: Balancing the World

A nomad at heart, Belinda Fox pitches her practice on the social, cultural and visual material gathered on her extensive travels throughout Asia. Having relocated to Singapore three years ago, the artist creates multilayered narratives responding to the vicissitudes of space in East Asia’s mega cities and metropolitan regions. Paradoxically defined by the ever-increasing need to grow and the rapid decline of space, these cities embody the tenuous balancing act endemic to a global society mounted on an insatiable thirst for ‘progress’.

With sculptures made in Shanghai, ceramics created in Singapore, and prints produced in Thailand, Fox’s new series considers what is being sacrificed in the stride of human advancement; namely the desiccation of tradition and the natural environment. The works fuse the notion of progression with that of regression, exposing the irrationality that belies an ostensibly rational impulse to move forward.

Crafted in close collaboration with Singaporean artist Jason Lim, Fox’s anthropomorphic ceramics linger on the line between creation and collapse, cemented in states of perfect acrobatics. Gritty glazes of charred blacks, burnt browns and mottled whites conjure a regenerating bush landscape after a wildfire, wherein creation emerges from destruction, hope from despair, beauty from decay. Channelling this nascent rebirth, the embryonic forms seem to coil and contort before our very eyes, their surface markings like some kind of internal anatomy tattooed on their ceramic skins. Historically embedded in one of the world’s oldest and most traditional art forms, these ceramics are emblematic reincarnations of tradition – symbolic foils for our incessant preoccupation with the present. Tactile and organic, they also function as material remedies to the virtualisation and increasing dephysicalisation of reality pivoting contemporary culture.

Fox’s paintings and prints are colonised by representations of extinct and endangered bird species saddled with precarious pilings of abstract objects. Literalising the idiom ‘to carry the weight of the world on your shoulders’, the birds are allusive embodiments of the environmental strain that parallels commercial gain. Working on a clay board, which she distresses and ages, the artist paints with watercolour, inks and encaustic wax in translucent veils that gently fade the image into the distance, into the past. The artist’s deconstructed renditions of the peony flower, a traditional Chinese symbol for prosperity and perfection, hints at the destructive shadow of human progress – how it can both build and destroy community. A dilution of tone, fracturing of form and delicate lineation of geometry suffuse the works with a tranquil and meditative air, ventilating the vigour of their conceptual currency.

This is Fox’s dialectic – seductive aesthetics channelling confronting thematics. Her images are symptomatic gateways into the duality of creation and destruction endemic to the contemporary human condition, ultimately imploring us to recalibrate our collective conscience.

A former Master Printer at Port Jackson Press Australia, Fox has won many prestigious awards, including the Paul Guest Drawing Prize (2010), the Burnie Print Prize (2007) and the Silk Cut Award for lino cut prints (2004). Recently, the artist worked with Urban Arts Projects (UAP) in Shanghai to make an experimental mild steel sculpture, and she has received several notable residencies including, this year, a printmaking residency at C.A.P Studios, Thailand. Her work is held in major collections including National Gallery of Victoria, National Gallery of Australia, QUT Art Museum and Artbank.

Elli Walsh

Arts Writer