Fiona Connor

As much as I love her and her work, I don’t think I’d ever want to be neighbours with Fiona Connor. First of all, she’s a workaholic and I fear any encounter with her might force an increased pressure for me to make, but it’s not really the making that worries me so much – it’s that her practice is inherently thorough, verging on the point of being nosy. Connor’s artistic career is that of finding, recording and highlighting the passed by, the ignored, the unseen, and if we lived too close, I know she’d know too much – a new scuff on my door, the subtleties of how my blinds were drawn, how poorly I’d parked the car, a sun hungry plant being moved into the window – all revealing way too much about my emotional states.
True to form, Fiona’s been in Dusseldorf, getting to know the Altstadt neighbourhood and all its nuances. For her exhibition at Kunstverein Dusseldorf, she’s produced a new alphabet, each letter pulled from things in and around the building – lifts, packing boxes, local business signage, flat numbers, metro stops, graffiti, texts you and I might never notice. There are posters which serve as a key of all the characters, in upper case, lower case, and numbers, and each individual letter has been made into a rubber stamp (the cheekiness of me being asked to write about this work is not lost). Along with this mixed up archive-as-alphabet, the space will be activated by interventions, both by visitors and invited apprentices from the nearby Berufsforderungswerk der Bauindustrie.
For her edition, Connor creates new prints, using her alphabet stamps, to spell the names of each of the masonry apprentices who constructed the forms in the gallery. Here, names become images, or even iconic, mirroring the value creating status an artist’s name might accrue. As with all of her work, there is an acknowledgement of hidden labour, which demystifies this very artist allure. While the source material for these works is straightforward, Connor uses this opportunity to mix and match, allowing signs and associations to appear through the randomness of a certain set of givens. Again, ever the urban archaeologist and reconstruction worker, Connor’s work captures the chaos of the city, while maintaining an absurdity and levity not commonly held by such a rigorous practice. While we didn’t all choose the path of colourful abstract painting, I still somehow imagine Fiona is having fun.
– Adam Stamp