about:
Fiona Bowie (we/they/us), b. K'emk'emeláy̓ (Vancouver);
interdisciplinary artist, musician/songwriter, lives and works on the stolen, unceded, ancestral and current territories
of the əəθkʷə̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵw̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish), and sə̓lil̓wətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. with acknowledgement
and support for their and all indigenous aeons-long nationhood, cultures, & all their relations.

Fiona variously employs photography, film, video, text, and sound to create immersive gallery installations, evolving public artworks
and web-based projects. Fiona's narrative and documentary approaches offer structural and spatial alternatives to ubiquitous and enduring linear hierachical narratives. Fiona has frequently designed, fabricated and assembled 360 degree/omni-directional projectors to defy historical rectalinear framing habits of commercially available technology and innovated system design to relay temporal shifts in her evolving public artworks. Gallery installations such as Swell(1995) and faltering repetition were created before immersive systems were available for use by artists (at that time, the domain of Planetariums). Her lightweight, diminutive 360° or omni-directional projectors produce immersive spaces while employing as little material as possible to realize them (see also phenotypes and Slip/Host). Due to these work's individualized mechanisms and optics, their dimensions are variable, fitting into various dimensions of space in which they may be installed.
Writing, archiving practice, and web-based interactive public particitation portals such as Put Words in Our Mouths are strategies Fiona employs to increase public access to her work and visibility of the subjects therein.

Fiona has also acted as a curator, and from 2014 to 2021 facilitated collaborations, projects, and research by artists, writers, and curators
at her Órbitas studio/residency in Costa Rica. Fiona is a singer/songwriter/musician for SlōSpinner.. Her musical and sound forays are here Sonics

The subject content of her work is motivated by compassion and lifelong interests in physics and nature. Fiona identifies as a multi-spēcial, intermolecular being to normalize that, on a subatomic scale, there is structurally no separation between us and everything else in existence. Respecting that all beings experience existence in their own way, Fiona's works centre on interconnectivity and social equity with others and other life forms (as highlighted in her script she penned in 2004 for Slip/Host - you can read the script here.

Bowie's Public Artworks also have bespoke image delivery design:
A collaboration between Bowie and computer scientists Sidney Fels and Morgan Hibert, the ever-evolving Flow, commissioned by the City of Vancouver, was Canada's first ongoing Media-based public artwork and ran continuously from 2009 to 2023, when it was finally decomissioned due to (dual) projector failures. This The AFTA 2010 award winning (first Canadian work to be awarded top 40 in NA) work was projected onto a 30' x 13.5' (20:9 aspect ratio) bank of ground floor windows a 1 Kinsway in Vancouver. Mixing foregrounds and backgrounds of altered landscapes from a thousandfold bank of images that Bowie shot 2005- 2009, customized open source software ran the work 24 hours a day, 360 days a year and allowed images to constantly evolve in scale and content every 2 minutes. No image was exactly reproduced over its 13 year tenure.
Employing switch glass as the projection surface, portions of the mis-en-scene Flow were designed to 'disappear' as the viewer moved close to the image, fracturing the image to reveal the street outside, through the fractured image. or conversly for the passerby on the street, opening a portal into the interior of the building.
The work still runs flawlessly on it's mac mini(s) and so will be reintroduced to the public online in 2026.


Surface

Surface, another commission by the City of Vancouver, was one of 6 artist initiated projects for 2010 Mapping and Marking, where artists submitted proposals for their works that were integral to locations of their own choosing. Surface was a 24/7, 365 day a year documentary of the undersea life of False Creek, a formally (historically) industrially polluted waterway at a time when the Great Pacific Garbage patch gained the public's attention of human impacts on the world's oceans. Located at Skwahchays, previously a sacred water of Sen̓áḵw of the əəθkʷə̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵw̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish), and sə̓lil̓wətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, "False Creek" became colonized, and then industrialized after the formation of the city of Vancouver and over the decades became one of the most polluted waterways in Canada.
With a camera mounted under the ferry Aquabus, utilizing a number of radio relay system dotted along False Creek and utilizing
LiveCasts powerful live video capabilities, people were able to witness the underwater life live via a screen on the ferry, a large LED cinema screen mounted on a
silo at Ocean Concrete and several monitors located at community centers and Science world, simulatiously available on the Surface website any time of day or night
all over the globe. The project operated from 2010-2013.


Shadoworks

Shadowworks (2011 through 2025), continues as a series of Google Earth interventions, that the artist considers as an eposodic Documentary. Each work draws attention to major events resulting from hegemony, Late Capitalism and normalized blind investment, that typically fall under the radar of popular awareness. The locations are sites of occupied, unceded territories, of environmental destruction, and of genocide. Bowie turns these sites into documenataries by 'fixing' the screen grabbed images with shadows or text, or by serializing them to reflect on the undisclosed that lay below the veneer of hegemonic systems. She then anonymously uploads them to join what are typically visitor or resident photos nearby the sites in question.

Land works
Land workslandworks, the flats,4,383, (+1) Response are collaborations with other planetary species.

Content of Reflective Form (Selected works)

Bowie's early work, such as the dynamically orbiting swell(1996) was centered on considering the framing and affirmation of cultural and
visual heirarchies through the representation of others (charactarization; portraiture). Personal, found and well-known portraits were cropped of context and arranged
into a sea of undulating facial expressions (revealing portraits that subtly progress through open mouthed gazes, frowns, smirks, toothy grins and back to gazes),
nullifying the original images' social contexts. Bowie's image machine refuted sustained observation of particular subjects by making them only fleetingly available
to the viewer. Through further experimentation, Bowie developed a desire to create forms of visual experience that would structurally mirror her content, rather than simply
relay it through already established means. Bowie's installations, through their stranger form(s), contrast taken for granted conventions or techniques that still endure, (ubiquitous rectalinear strategies:from painting through photography and cinematography).

Other 360 degree immersive installations Bowie produced over the years became narrative in structure with bespoke image machines and include, among others:
phenotypes, where we become night walkers observing the indoor activities in a car-centric suburban cul-de-sac;
Slip/Host, an otherworldly place where Alan Cumming plays two roles in an outlandish
narrative examining the excesses of contemporary capital and social order.

Bowie considers Biodynamism (and associated activism) an integral part of her life-long practice. Both informing her media-based
work and daily life wherever she has lived, this stewardship part of her practice includes soil and biodiversity restoration as well
as working alongside minute organisms in the production of artworks."I can't separate the (past and current) state of nature from my art
practice: what I create, generate, contribute to, impart and disseminate as a human can't be compartmentalized in this way: I always have
a nerve ending that connects to my environs.

Recent:

Fell Silent is a collection of videos and sound that started production during her in years in Costa Rica.