Fiona Harding/Spirit You
B. 1984
Fiona Harding (Spirit You) is an interdisciplinary Australian artist based in Namba/Nambour whose practice examines the link between the physical and the spiritual.
Working across painting, installation, sculpture, performance, and media, Harding investigates how spiritual experience and ecological attention can expand dominant understandings of communication, perception, and reality. Her work is informed by direct encounters with the natural world and an ongoing interest in altered states, and non-human agency.
Hand-built, labour-intensive processes function as sites of reflection that extend beyond exclusively rational or empirical frameworks. Through repetition and slow-making, Harding positions artistic production as both a contemplative act and a response to the efficiency-driven values of contemporary capitalism.
Recurring symbols, personal mythologies, and vivid colour relationships appear throughout her largely autobiographical practice. Drawing on transformative experiences while remaining open to collective interpretation, her works invite audiences to consider alternative ways of relating to the living world.
Current areas of investigation include interconnectedness, cyclical systems, psychedelic experience, and the possibility of communication across species boundaries. Harding’s practice asks what becomes possible when nature is approached not as backdrop or resource, but as an active presence with agency.
Harding works on the unceded lands of the Kabi Kabi/Gubbi Gubbi People and acknowledges their enduring custodianship and ongoing relationship with Country.
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