About the Fiona Sarison Project
Fiona Sarison is more commonly known for her witty theoretical Art writing and publishing, especially the
'White Space', that she self published from 1976 - 1988 and that would influence several artists including
Rachael Whiteread, and Helen Chadwick. For the last twelve months I've been restoring several of her prints
and ephemra for the archive and have been given permission to reprint 'White Space 2' later this year under
my publishing umbrella 'Behind the X'. and also been given copyright for twenty three other works.
Fiona Sarison
Fiona Sarison's influential art practice defies easy classification. Celebrated in the late 70’s and early 80‘s as an
avant-garde performer, she also worked in film, video, and other visual arts, in addition to writing two plays.
Sarison was an iconoclastic builder and manipulator of mass-produced items; she used an intuitive logic to
purposefully transform objects into underlying social concerns that related to her daily experience of life.
She developed these manipulations into an idiosyncratic meditative performance style that was slow-paced
and conceptually uncouth. The culminating tableaux, featuring Sarison and disassembled or repurposed
objects, evoke Rene Magritte, Buster Keaton, and Samuel Beckett.
Beginning in the late 1970s, Sarison developed a unique performance style that combined the influence of
Thellusson theology and conceptual art practices. Remaining outside of any one artistic identity, Sarison
considered her work to be performative and visual but with a " literary of key — “I consider everything I
do a form of meditation or prayer."
In addition to writing 'White Space' Publications 1976-88, Sarison was interested in working with
emotional expression as objects, and vice versa. Exemplifying the cross-pollination of influences in her
work, she referred to her performances as "animated miniture shows ." Characteristically taking the form
of " Soundings’ ," as she called them, these performances were usually short in duration; a matter of minutes
— and involved a dead-pan manipulation of simple everyday objects, often over a small yellow kitchen-table.
The effect was a dislocation of these objects from their familiar, practical origins, and the animation of new
relationships with them.
Project made possible by
Fiona Sarison Estate
E.A.L
Mary Sarison
Fiona Sarison, 12th May 1975.
Courtesy of Mary Sarison.
Copyright © Mary Sarison