Art & The Quotidian Object: Fiona Hall

Mourning Chorus (detail)

Fiona Hall - 2007-08 - resin, plastic, vinyl, electronics, vitrine

The use of the quotidian object in contemporary art is a widespread convention. Long gone are the days of the Dadaists and their readymades, now is the time to alter the everyday [object] in order to transform it’s meaning and purpose. Or so, is the common practice.

Fiona Hall’s ‘Mourning Chorus’ is a prime example of the quotidian object being used in an artwork to create various layers of metaphor and significance.

Hall uses the empty bottles of household poisons, such as detergents, drain cleaners, motor oil, bleach and mutates them into birds by adding beaks of resin. Each beak is representative of a particular species of near-to-extinction rainforest bird, every one native to New Zealand. There is a light wired up to each bottle, in turn they flicker and go out one by one. It is as if the birds have been poisoned by these common poisons to such an extent they are now unrecogniseable. A person may look at a bottle of detergent and think it mundane, everyday, quotidian. In this context, the items have an element of danger, due to the fact they are now being closely linked with death.

The display case, although not usually at the height of importance, creates further layers of meaning. For one, it is coffin shaped, another allusion to death as well as being reminiscent of something one might find in a natural history museum (a glass case of taxidermied birds). The glass of the case is engraved with the indigenous plants of the birds’ natural environments. Suggesting that the damage of household poisons occurs within these various habitats.

‘Mourning Chorus’ it’s self, of course, is a pun. A ‘morning chorus’, being that which is heard in the rainforest at dawn as the birds begin to wake and ‘mourning’, attaching a sense of grief and suggesting that this may be a short lived performance for the birds of the New Zealand rainforest.

The quotidian object can be easily transformed to become an artwork with depth and the ability to make significant statements.