Fiona Gavino with her Australian, Filipino, and Maori heritage, has been described as an intercultural artist working the traditional into the contemporary. There is an undeniable crafted aesthetic in her work and through the artist’s attentive conceptual ideas, intercultural dialogues she has eloquently placed her practice within sculpture and installation.
Gavino graduated from Charles Darwin University with a BA Visual Arts in 2006 and was a practising artist there for 12 years. Her work features in Hot Springs; the Northern Territory & Contemporary Australian Artists (Macmillan Art Publishing). In 2007 she relocated to Western Australia and currently lives and works in Fremantle. In 2014 Gavino was a recipient of an Asialink Residency to the Philippines researching post-colonial discourse in contemporary Filipino art and rattan furniture making. In 2015 she was invited to return to exhibit at the Cultural Centre of the Philippines with her solo show, In-between-spaces.
For the past three years she has been working with the Yindjibarndi women in Roebourne collaborating with them to create sculpture, baskets and reviving their traditional practice of string and net making. In 2018 she undertook a residency in Madrid working with an inner-city community in the throws of gentrification to produce a site-specific installation and body of prints.
For the last two years she has worked with Japanese ‘Wara’ artists in York (WA) creating large scale sculptures of endangered Australian animals from wheat straw.
