Orbit

About Orbit

This abstract contemporary painting is by Fiona Ackerman.

Fiona Ackerman has exhibited her paintings on an international stage. A prolific artist, Ackerman’s oeuvre features an impressive range of styles featured in a variety of series. This intriguing composition is from her ‘Glasslands’ series and showcases her intuitive sense of colour and her signature use of abstract organic form. This series was inspired by an idea that explores the garden as being both a reflection of the natural and the artificial. This concept of a garden—Heterotopia (a world within worlds) where the ‘wildness’ of a garden is actually controlled was discussed by Michel Foucault, a famous 20th-century French philosopher and historian. The palette of this painting is an earthy mix of blues, greens, sienna, purple and red contrasted with slate gray and bright white.

“These 26 paintings emerged from a process of exploration beginning with pieces of painted paper cut in shapes of foliage, placed inside a mirror box (hence, glass-land). The resulting three-dimensional mirrored images shatter, amplify and disrupt conventional views of nature rendered on a flat surface, giving rise to lush compositions with depth and unexpected juxtapositions.” Fiona Ackerman

Fiona Ackerman was born in Ottawa in 1978. She studied painting at Concordia University and completed a BFA at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2002. She has held more than 20 solo exhibitions internationally. Fiona’s studio practice extends beyond painting to include several large-scale murals, video and other public art projects. In her free time, she writes and records music and videos, often working with other musicians. She currently lives and works in Vancouver, BC.