Fiona creates cutting edge art
SCULPTING and horses are the two great loves of artist Fiona Riviere’s life but after a health scare earlier this year she’s putting her well-being and art first.
Living off-grid in a Dumfriesshire forest, Fiona recently returned from living in France where she’d been breeding and training horses for 21 years.
But she came across her new home completely by chance. Fiona explained: “I found it completely by accident, there are a couple of barns at the bottom of the wood and I thought I might be able to restore them, if I could find out who owned here.
“I got in touch with the forester and we had a bit of a chat but the barns were too far gone and he said ‘how about I put in a shipping container for you’ and I thought that sounds alright and he put in a caravan in as well so that’s how it came about.”
Her quiet haven is surrounded by fir trees and has views stretching from the Lake District to the Moffat Hills and is the perfect place to spark her creativity.
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Fiona continued: “It’s the perfect place to concentrate and get your thoughts together.
“Through my life I’ve always worked very hard, a lot of manual work with the horses and everything.
“I’ve got fibromyalgia neuropathy, PTSD and it all caused other problems with my health and it causes my body too much pain, so I have to work as and when I can and sometimes I can’t work for days.
“Living out here gives me the peace of mind and allows me to concentrate 100 per cent. I don’t have any disturbances or distractions, it suits me absolutely to the ground.
“My friends and family quite often come up to visit me and in the summer time they often stay over in the camper van or in a tent and they love it. Not enough to live out here though!”
And her remote living is paying off as four of her pieces are currently on display in the grounds of Gracefield Arts Centre, each accompanied by a poem written by Fiona.
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Each piece is made from salvaged materials, with some incorporating her life-long love of horses whilst having a very deep personal meaning. “My life for a long time was horses, horses, horses and my life has been an amalgamation of my art and horses,” Fiona said. “I’ve never done anything else but I’ve never done both at the same time, one has always had to take a back seat for the other.
“But now the horses have taken a back seat and are allowing my art to come forward again.”
The largest of the pieces at Gracefield is named ‘The Conversation’ and invites visitors to engage in the lost art.
One of Fiona’s latest works the ‘Crying Angel’ is also on display, which she made following her health troubles back in Spring: “At the beginning of this year I was very ill and I thought to myself ‘do I want to live?’ That’s where the ‘Crying Angel’ came from, it’s a little bit of a self portrait.
“It asks ‘are angels overburdened these days?’, There’s so much atrocity in the world and angels used to take us up in their arms and take us away to a happy place.
“Now they have got so many people to carry and to help that they actually feel themselves that it’s too much.”
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