We are blessed at The Sound Temple to have Fiona Gavino join us as a selected artist in residence. Fiona is the lead sculptural community artist commissioned to sculpt the feature piece for this programme. She will be demonstrating weaving and hosting an array of workshops here in the Perth Hills as part of our annual ‘Common Threads Woven Through Community’ Project.

FIONA GAVINO b. 1971
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 and collaborative practice 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 practicing 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 where she spent three months in the Philippines studying rattan furniture making techniques to apply to her sculpture practice and in 2015 she was invited to exhibit at the Cultural Centre of the Philippines with a solo show, In-between-spaces.

Gavino is a nationally recognised fibre artist, she teaches extensively in Fremantle and for the past three years she has been working with the Yindjibarndi women in the Pilbara collaborating with them to create contemporary fibre sculpture, baskets and reviving their traditional practice of 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 for the last two years worked with Japanese artists and the community of York (WA) creating large scale sculptures of endangered Australian animals from wheat straw.

Common Threads Woven Through Community is a month long community engagement project which includes topics of integrating sustainability, creativity, and traditional hand-crafted wisdom of the ages.

Our 2020 theme embraces the inter connection of our living world – the seen and unseen “The Pollination of Life” exploring the underlying connections between artists, creatives, sustainable enterprises and movements. As we all carry a thread that collaboratively weaves the health and wellbeing of our collective future on this planet.

These events are designed to share art and craft forms and exchange knowledge, to open participants up to a new way of life, they encourage the questioning of our thought patterns, they support the dissolving of old belief systems bringing a sense of belonging. You will feel deeply inspired by being part of a continuing impulse of considerable change.