Curve Ball and Take No Prisoners

One of Australia’s leading contemporary artists, Fiona Hall began her career as a photographer. Since then, she has worked in a wide range of media from paintings and sculptures to installations and public commissions such as gardens. She is known for meticulously recycling familiar objects —Coca-Cola cans, currency notes, glass beads— and transforming them into works that critically engage with themes like colonialism, consumerism and man’s rampant abuse of nature.

Curve Ball (2013) and Take No Prisoners (2013) are paintings made with earth pigments on bark cloth (cloth made from flattened tree bark, traditionally used by the aboriginal people of Australia and Pacific Islanders) that portray hellish visions of a world laid to waste. The texture of the cloth and the tones the artist has used give these paintings the appearance of antique scrolls or maps. Of these, Curve Ball is explicit in its forewarning of an impending ecological catastrophe. It depicts an apocalyptic landscape strewn with tree stumps from which rises a burning globe. Skulls —a recurring motif in Hall’s work— appear here perched on the dead remains of trees, instilling terror with their ghoulish grimaces.

Take No Prisoners (2013) depicts a similarly dystopic vision of a map being slowly consumed by an ocean of fire. On the map and the ocean surface appear ripples from within which fiery eyes stare at the viewer. The skulls appear here again, marking death. Take No Prisoners evokes violent histories of colonialism and war even as it depicts nightmarish visions of a world wrecked by the environmental destruction.