Fawn Daphne Plessner produces visual and text based artwork and public art interventions that draw on investigative journalistic strategies and techniques. Her artwork explores the aesthetics of a number of interweaving themes such as notions of 'ownership' (of land) and the aesthetic/affective dimension of (un)treatied relationships, the politics of 'rural/urban' imaginaries, migration and mobility and political membership (kinship) extending to non-Human beings.
She studied painting at Emily Carr, UBC (Art History) and at the Akademie der Bildenden Kunste, Munich, Germany (under the artist Robin Page, an early member of the Fluxus movement). She holds a BA (Hons) Philosophy, Birkbeck College, University of London (UK) and a PhD in Art + Politics, Goldsmiths College, University of London, (UK). Her Doctoral research assesses the phenomena of 'citizen art' as a new field of art practice, with a focus on how artists perform new modes of (non-statist) citizenship through 'acts of citizenship' (Isin).
She has won a number of research grants (UAL Research Grants (UK); Arts & Humanities Research Board (UK); Canada Council for the Arts et al.). From the 1990s to 2008, her work focused on painting, with solo and group exhibitions held in private galleries and museums throughout the UK and Europe (paintings exhibited at The Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; Chester Beatty, Dublin; Staatliches Museum, Regensburg; Aberystwyth Arts Centre et al.; artist publications: Whitechapel Gallery, London; MOMA, NY, et al.). Her work is also in a number of private collections in the UK, Ireland and Germany. From 2010 to present, her work has focused on art interventions, some of which take the form of newspapers (see citizenartist.org.uk). Ongoing collaborative art and research projects are 'Clouded Title' (with Emily Artinian, Street/Road Artists Space, Pennsylvania, USA) and 'The Aesthetics of Trees, Fish and Deer' (with Doug LaFortune, Tsawout First Nation).
Her current art project, the Tree Museum, explores the aesthetics and politics of multiplicitous settler relationships to forests and animals lives. The Museum is based on Pender Island, the unceded territory of the WSANEC First Nation, and it asks the question of how the widespread and accelerated annihilation of animals and forests have become normalized and entwined with acts of British now Canadian colonial land appropriation, suburbanization, identity and desire. The Museum takes its cue from one of the core principles of WSANEC Law: "That the origin of living things in this world are our ancient relatives, and that they must be treated with respect". From this perspective, the Tree Museum advocates for the well being of forests, animals (namely 'wild' animals) and other beings as central to the obligations and responsibilities of the wider political community.
See tree-museum.com for further information
