Fiona Hall
Artist Bio
Fiona is a Sydney based photographer born in Scotland. She has exhibited her photographs at Federation Square. She has holds a passionate interest for wild and lonely places and has been to Antarctica eleven times. A remarkable achievement when considering she has multiple sclerosis.
MS affects the lives of over 22,000 young Australian’s. This has not stopped Fiona maintaining a sense of adventure while travelling and living in countries as diverse as Bermuda and Chile. She continues to see the world with a photographer’s eye and in her words, her condition, “has added a new dimension to the term ‘camera shake’.”
Artist Statement
I have been fascinated from an early age by the icy wilderness at the bottom of the world, and reared on tales of Shackleton, Scott and their like. I am adamant that Antarctica should not be closed to ‘ordinary’ travellers – and not exclusive for the preserves of science. It’s not a good thing; it’s not just theirs simply because they have the knowledge. This knowledge hasn’t stopped them making an unholy mess of places like McMurdo Sound. It was tourism that helped force the scientific community into cleaning up their act.
It is with this manifesto I raised awareness of the difficulties of day-to-day living with MS, and to explore the idea that disability and adventure travel are not mutually exclusive. I undertook a voyage to Antarctica followed by an extensive ‘road trip’ in Chile, to raise funds for MS research.