Belinda Fox: and the little things

Consistently across her oeuvre, Belinda Fox has knitted together personal poetics and global realities with a rare sincerity. This coalescence comes naturally to an artist who has lived all over the world, most recently in The Netherlands.

Fox’s show ‘and the little things’ orbits the notion of home, in all its billowing plurality. Having lived in several countries over the past decade, the artist reflects on the nebulous network of feelings, people and things that contribute to ‘home’. Featuring new paintings and prints, a small collaborative sculptural cabinet, and a digital large-scale wall print, this series lays bare the paradoxes inherent to experiences of home and habitat. In paintings large and small, episodes of the everyday collide with global happenings. “To untangle the two seems impossible to me”, says Fox of this disorienting duality, “In this show both the worries of the world and the worries about what’s for dinner tonight will coexist”.

In her smaller works, Fox captures humble minutiae that enrich our daily lives. The first cherries of the season gifted from a friend, their plump flesh like glistening rubies summoning festivity, friendship and family. Or native birdlife visiting the artist’s studio, a coexistence and resilience that keeps the environment at the forefront of her work. These paintings are little portals into Fox’s memory, vignettes of her heart. The artist encourages us, gently, to witness the profound micro moments in our own lives, “Everything is a little part of a big story”. Her larger works, contrastingly, evince global events – quite literally the bigger picture. Catastrophe and cherries, wildflowers and war – the personal courts the political in this series and a terrible beauty emerges quietly from within.

Fox delivers her ideas gently via allegory and symbolism, creating a safe space for people to contemplate their own constructs of home. Through her proficiency with watercolour, beauty is a gateway into the conceptual terrain. Layers of watercolour cascade over the boards in crystalline veils. Irregular shapes painted and collaged mingle but never touch, like perfectly polarised magnets. This is Fox’s dialectic; visual allure cavorting with troubling truths.

For the first time, Fox has constructed a twenty-meter wall print that underlays the paintings, hatching both harmony and cacophony. This print is based on a drawing of a wave, it washes over the gallery and acknowledges home for many is not smooth sailing. The wallpaper was designed to alert and jar, to create unease, fragmentation, energy. Crisis and aid are captured in Fox’s quintessential safety orange motif. Amidst the extreme colours, the paintings are life rafts, buoys, providing reprieve – “perhaps using art as the anchor to keep us afloat,” reflects Fox.

In another first, Fox invited artist friends from Australia and the Netherlands to contribute one work each depicting their sense of home. Artistic collaboration has become, over many years, Fox’s solution to the solitude of the studio. For her, the nuances and personal connections of collaboration create great joy and inspiration for her art practice and personal life. In ‘and the little things’ Fox’s work sits alongside pieces by Glenn Barkley, Juan Ford, Neville French, Yulyia Gwilym, Leila Jeffreys, Wilfred Kalf, Angus McDonald, Melinda Schawel, Sophia Szilagyi, Joshua Yeldham, Eugène van Veldhoven and Annika Syrjämäki. Fox reflects, “These artists are a big part of my sense of home and community that is a constant source of inspiration for me”. We are privy here to a special creative communion, an unspoken togetherness that surpasses language differences and cultural borders.

Compositionally within and between the works in this show is Fox’s ongoing search for balance. The weight of the world pressing into the everyday creates fine fissures, and if you look closely, you might spot the golden glow of a shared humanity. The kintsugi of life. Home is a privilege, Fox seems to tell us, and the little things make all the difference.

Elli Walsh
Principle Writer, Artist Profile

Forging an international career in Australia, USA, Europe, Hong Kong, Singapore, Korea and Jakarta, Fox has received several notable awards including the Paul Guest Drawing Prize (2010) and Burnie Print Prize (2007) and been a finalist in the Swan Hill Print & Drawing Award (2022, 2018, 2006, 2004) and Fremantle Art Prize (2007, 2006, 2003). Her work is held in major collections including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, National Gallery of Victoria, National Gallery of Australia, Manly Art Gallery & Museum, Queensland University of Technology Art Museum, Artbank, Fremantle Arts Centre, Print Council Of Australia, Swan Hill Regional Gallery and Wollongong University.