Fiona Edmonds-Dobrijevich

Practising artist, lecturer, and long time ocean swimmer.

My art practice investigates the relationships between the Feminine and the Oceanic, the ecological and cultural, the geological and the biological.It refers to my practice of ocean swimming, and the sensory bodily encounters that I have with the sea.

I maintain a "dualistic" painting practice, in which I swing from a more representational pictorial style in oils, to a performative, more abstracted realisation of ideas and thoughts with watercolour. My painting practice swings from figurative representations of images of the ocean, its horizons and inhabitants, to a much more material and embodied process which harnesses the action of water itself. In this aspect i like to assert that I am "thinking like water", allowing the flow to seep, collide, enter, subvert or breach boundaries.

"My Life as a Fish" series documents daily encounters daily basis in the ocean. Its gestation probably began in the Mary Kelly’s Post Partum Document which I saw at the Ivan Doherty Gallery as a schoolgirl,  Kelly's documentation of each day as a new mother over six months, This series is equally informed by the abstract Tantric paintings from Rajasthan which I saw at the Venice Biennale in 2013, a series of highly abstract and symbolic paintings representing the forces of life and the universe, each one a sort of minimalist consist of meditative, symbolic signs.

It is the material reality of all of this which creates the capacity to think with water, to engage in the practices and ideas which underpin all the various iterations of New Materialist thought, that urges the contestation of the linguistic binaries, anthropocentrisms and other questionable yet culturally condoned structures, and towards a more ethical and open understanding of what it means to be, in this material world.