Bio

Fiona Gavino is a highly skilled weaver. The exhibition, Making Ground Breaking Ground, further cements her reputation as such. As you view her work, keep in mind that handweaving is a painstaking process that requires great care and dedication. Fiona’s choices of design, form, colour, and technique are superb, and she ranks among the most innovative weavers in Australia.

Nalda Searles 2023

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) and in Rara; The Art & Tradition of Filipino Mat Weaving (Philippines Textile Council). 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. Over the last six years Gavino has been working collaboratively with the Juluwarlu Art Group’s Yindjibarndi woman in the Pilbara to create contemporary fibre sculpture, baskets and reviving their traditional practice of net making. She has also worked in Madrid and with Japanese Wara (rice straw) artists in York (WA) to create large scale sculptures of endangered Australian animals from wheat straw. She held a major survey exhibition Making Ground Breaking Ground of her 25 year career in 2023. In 2024 Gavino won the Andrea Stretton Memorial Award at Sculpture by the Sea (Cottesloe).