Fiona Shewan

5 - 27 March 2026
Opening celebration: Thursday 5 March, 5-7pm

Index Cards is part of an ongoing project that investigates the play of colour, light and perception in Vladimir Nabokov’s literary output and his work as a lepidopterist.

Born with synaesthesia, the writer’s rich perceptual field was greatly informed by this sensory crossover he experienced. For Nabokov, each letter of the alphabet conjured to his mind a corresponding colour.

This art project was originally inspired by Nabokov’s autobiography, Speak, memory which straddles the line between autobiography and fiction. The book problematises memory in a similar way to the photograph as it operates as an embellished, detailed reconstruction of Nabokov’s life.

The book is littered with passages that describe in fine detail the movement of light throughout the day. It is a masterful study on the way light activates colour and perception. In this way, it felt intrinsically connected to photography and the architectural design of the scales on butterfly wings which do not contain pigment. The wings of butterflies produce colour when these microscopic scales interact with light.

Index Cards features a series of works that play off this notion of colour or perception as unfixed and continually subject to change, an instability that corresponds to Nabokov's denouncement of linear time.

For Nabokov, time operates like a spiral. In this spiral each thought or experience leaves a trace that curls around the spiral indefinately. Index Cards probes these notions of colour, light, perception and time.

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Originally experimenting with analogue photographic techniques, Fiona Shewan’s practice has evolved into an expanded approach centred on the embodied experience of making through analogue processes.

Her work often fuses elements of poetry, literature, philosophy and image-making practices to explore the ways vision functions. This approach is fundamentally phenomenological, deeply rooted in her photographic background.

Shewan understands photography as a process of sculpting light, one that is intimately connected to the earth.

Through her practice, she invites viewers to feel both captivated and embodied by the complex and intimate relationships of matter, seeking to express that which is unseen or overlooked, the atoms and molecules that coalesce and commingle.