Bio

Fiona Gavino with Australian, Filipino, and Maori heritage, has been described as an intercultural artist working the traditional into the contemporary. Gavino graduated from Charles Darwin University with a BA Visual Arts in 2006 and was a practising artist there for 12 years. Gavino strives to use basket making materials and techniques in new and innovative ways to create sculpture, installation, video and printmaking. With basketry as the foundation to her practice there is an undeniable crafted aesthetic to her work but through the artist’s attentive conceptual ideas and intercultural dialogues she has placed her practice in a more expansive realm. As an artist she pushes the boundaries of what basketry can physically do and say, permitting her the capacity to create a broader conversation across various cultures, with the hope of creating socially inclusive art

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 and was invited to return the following year to exhibit at the Cultural Centre of the Philippines with a solo show, In-between-spaces. Fiona Gavino is a nationally recognised fibre artist, she teaches extensively in Fremantle and for the past three years has been working with the Yindjibarndi woman 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. Gavino was a finalist in the John Stringer Art Prize, 2020.