Chris Fontana

Size: 214.5 cm (h) x 254 cm (w)

Medium: mixed media on 104 panels of Japanese rice paper

Mappa Mundi emerged from my attraction to the medieval mappa mundi (world map) form, which emphasises the relationship between landscape and story. The Azaria/Chamberlain case – a formative introduction to the idea of injustice and media influence – forms the natural foundation of my depicted ‘world’ view, which is grounded within an insular but increasingly global Australia. Stepping beyond sensationalist news cycles to hint at the broader philosophy of related issues, I use the anthropology of motherhood throughout Australian history to explore the character of a country who bases it’s identity on the natural world, but repeatedly demonstrates it’s disconnection from natural instinct/processes.

Size: 132cm (h) x 134cm (w)

Medium: mixed media on 35 panels of Japanese Rice Paper.

Once known as Pleasant Island, Nauru and its landscape have been subject to a long history of economic exploitation, agricultural degradation and dependency by Australia. Using archival media to transcend the limitations of contemporary sensationalist media, this is an examination of more complex layers of story that go well beyond the current political issue of offshore detention in Nauru, to convey how capitalist colonialism so profoundly influences geography and cultural identity.

Again using the medieval mappa mundi (world map) form for its emphasis on the relationship between landscape and story in creating a world view, I’m particularly drawn to both the pro-active and aesthetic value of text that complements mappa mundi imagery, and for its latent similarity to the contemporary (very precise but also in some ways narrative) perspective of the world offered to us by Google Maps.

Size:148cm (w) x 146cm (h)

Medium: mixed media on 29 panels of Japanese rice paper

As I worked on Brown Gold I was struck by how much the nature of story changes with the flow of time and human activity. This work began as a visual exploration of the history of coal mining, and the largely overlooked impact it has on local communities. But as environmental crisis projections escalate due to climate change, historical stories of domestic politics, racial history, pollution and conservation are now dwarfed by the more serious global implications of a single industry. As our world-view evolves, what was simple has become complicated; what once affected isolated communities now affects everybody, everywhere. Historical material becomes philosophically loaded, enabling a local history to tell a global story.

Again using the medieval mapamundi form for its emphasis on the relationship between landscape and story, I create works on paper that incorporate imagery and text to explore a current narrative world-view based on archival media history.

A paper fetish, a story addiction, and a preoccupation with emotion. Created during a period of paralysing doubt, Prelude is a humorous self-portrait in 21 chapters. Painted as a graphic narrative, it sits at the intersection between the personal and the political, describing the struggle of being an introverted artist in an era obsessed with the public self, and a personal struggle for cultural identity and authority during a period of intense public uncertainty.

Materials: ink, acrylic, and watercolour on 21 panels of rice paper
Size: 150 cm [h] x 340 cm [w]

[Detail TBA]

The story of the polar bear this portrait refers to is a visual work-in-progress on my studio wall. It came to me in the wee small hours, at a time when like many artists I was wrestling with issues of racism in Australia. The new knowledge I was acquiring was confronting, taking me from capitalism to racial disadvantage to racial privilege and back to capitalism. Then I diverged, into histories that are too big for my brain, and will take years to process. The polar bear comes out of those histories.
The story-in-progress on my wall is a funny story; if you’re my audience it’ll make you laugh. Your own laughter will then disturb you, because the humour is dark. It will occur to you too late that laughter is inappropriate, and you’ll be caught exactly where you need to be, in that place of knowing something you don’t really want to identify. You won’t be able to help yourself. When you walk away from the work you’ll carry the polar bear with you, and a new level of self-knowledge, and I’ll have done my job.
Good, because I can’t carry that polar bear alone; I’m just an artist, and a woman, and white, and so far from the habitat of a polar bear. But in an age of politically endorsed devaluation of nuanced thought and the humanities, I am necessary. Hence, this self-portrait. With a bear.

Medium: acrylic on five panels of 640gsm paper
Size: 161 x 214 cm [h x w]

Using character stereotypes from Australia’s fun-loving and larrikin suburban culture, with this work I return to my suburban origins to convey the tightrope I walk when I bring the ideas I work with to the community I live amongst. Removed from the finely tuned functioning of natural ecosystems, the suburban model is one of a society artificially maintained, with the illusion of immunity from the effects of human activity on the environment as a whole. Caught between my enjoyment of the endearing ‘Australian’ sense of humour and my sense of alarm about the many pockets of our affluent society that have the luxury of choosing to remain largely oblivious to world events [such as the extinction event happening around us], this is a light-hearted look at the tension between belonging and the need to make important conversations happen.

Dimensions: 86cm [h] x 162 cm [w]
medium: ink, pen, watercolour and acrylic on rice paper

Goddiggers is a light-hearted reflection on the anglo-european relationship to landscape, allegorically presenting human resistance to the bigger ecological story. By depicting our evolving understanding of pre-history – as revealed by the land itself through geological and archaeological exploration – my aim is to encourage reflection on the challenges the natural world [through climate change] now places on our ideological outlook.

Medium: pen, ink and acrylic on rice paper
Size: 56 x 94 cm [h x w]

Size: 122 x 122 cm
Medium: acrylic on 2 canvas panels

The jig is up. Numerous artists are writing about a mass realisation: we’ve all been trying to arrive at a place in our careers that doesn’t exist. The sweet spot, where we’ve earned the freedom to create indefinitely without fighting for time or competing for funding.

So this is what I looked like when I gave up painting [again], put my feet up and read a book, but my endless-reading fantasy only lasted about five minutes. Because when reality bites and I fantasise about stopping, the irony is that my first instinct is to paint and write about it. I think things like, ‘I’ll just finish this one more thing’. Only, it’s never just one more thing, your engagement with the world of ideas doesn’t just stop. You still have to fund your practice, often with a soul-destroying day job.

There’s no way out of this cycle. We all know this, and that’s why discussions have hit the mainstream. A better future for artists is being imagined into being. A girl can dream.

Inexhaustible Bounty tells a story of time and forgetting in which Tasmania’s origin as a convict settlement perpetuates a simplification of Australia’s history. Her thriving whaling industry didn’t feature in the history of colonial Australia I was taught at school. It wasn’t until undertaking novel research that I came across Andrew Darby’s Harpoon, and discovered its significance to the bigger story.

Harpoon led me to more than a lost Eden, where the sounds of whales moaning and blowing kept inhabitants awake at night. As soon as “civiisation” landed upon her shores, whalers and sealers swarmed to the island to take advantage of the inexhaustible bounty of their giant prey, forging a direct relationship between empire and capitalism.

Illustrating the brutality of colonial life, Inexhaustible Bounty combines archival maps from early Antipodean exploration with the storied landscapes found in medieval map aesthetics, to tell a story of excess. Whaling’s abrupt interruption of established ecosystems was to provide a rude awakening for our own species, alerting us to the finite nature of resources. Often characterised by a battle between embracing and resisting industrial development, Tasmania and her depleted whale populations provide a symbolic precursor to our conflicted relationship with the natural world.

Size: 111 cm (h) x 115 cm (w)
Medium: Ink and acrylic on 46 panels of rice paper (framed as a single work)

Glover Prize 2023: Highly Commended… and highly grateful !!

Title: Out of Nothing, Nothing
Size: 184 x 264 cm (h x w)
Medium: ink, watercolour and acrylic on 70 panels of rice paper


For this work I’ve borrowed from Macrobian map forms, commonly used in medieval manuscripts to present remnants of sciences and philosophies developed during Antiquity.

Depicting Australia through an anthropological lens, Out of Nothing, Nothing considers the interruption of human ideological evolution during medieval xtian expansion, and the subsequently human-centric worldview “we” brought with us during colonial migration.

Scholars have tried since the renaissance to revive ‘natural philosophy’. Having discovered the lost work of the Roman poet Lucretius, they recovered a vital link to Epicureanism and early sciences, which describe the insignificance and brevity of human life when pitted against the permanence and magnitude of the natural world.

I use Lucretius’s fragmented words to lament lost knowledge and alternative evolutionary paths. While the imagery tracks our anthropocentric landscape, my own words play with Australia’s geological story, nudging us towards the embrace of our transience and insignificance as philosophically ‘positive’.

Title: Nina Pulls a Hamstring, 2023
Size: 167.5 x 182 cm
Medium: acrylic on 2 canvas panels


NPaH playfully laments the lost opportunities for promoting arts literacy in Australia, due to the imbalance of arts/sports coverage by mainstream news platforms. I’ve painted the members of ShrewD Artist Collective trying to be interesting, capturing the desperation that taints the lives of artists struggling to survive on the margins of relevance.

$port is invaluable, but as our dominant cultural focus it takes up all the space. We each long for elevation of the arts, for increased approachability via naturalistic public exposure to varied arts events, celebration of a buoyant sector rich with ideas, and the points of connection it creates.

[ShrewD Artist Collective Members include – from left to right – Tracey Lamb, Myself (Chris Fontana), Nina Sanadze, Mimmalisa Trifilo and Amanda Laming.]