BEATRICE FLOATS ON VENUS

"The opening lines to Dante's The Divine Comedy introduce the theme of a journey. It is a journey beyond the grave through Hell and Purgatory to Paradise. The twelve Polaroid photographs that make up Fiona Hall's Illustrations to Dante's Divine Comedy, 1988, also follow that journey: they illustrate aspects of Dante's fourteenth-century poem and progress through the cantos of Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso....Fiona Hall interprets the scene: she cuts and moulds discarded aluminium soft-drink cans to form menacing vegetation, human figures, dogs and harpiers which she then photographs against elaborate settings of found materials. She also paints and burnishes surfaces which, when translated into the shallow space and grey-green colours of the Polaroid photographs have an ambiguous spatial effect - like grisaille in which monochromatic, painted scenes give the illusion of sculpted relief. Both Hall's and Dante's versions communicate elements of contemporary experience. Dante through his use of vernacular Italian language and Hall in her choice of commonplace, mass-produced material" (K Davidson, Garden of Earthly Delights - The Work of Fiona Hall, Canberra, 1992, p. 14)