FIONA CURRAN
Fiona Curran (b.1971 Manchester) read Philosophy at the University of Manchester before studying at Manchester School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art, she teaches at the Royal College of Art in London and works from her studio in Cambridgeshire.
Curran’s practice is rooted in painting but moves outwards to explore collage and the use of an expanded range of materials and processes, including textiles and site-specific installation. Her work is about an experience of landscape beyond the scenic “view,” towards a broader sense of place that is more attuned to feeling, memory and attention. Curran is also interested in the ways that screen-based technologies are impacting our embodied engagement with our environment. The presence of a heightened colour palette, alongside assembled and collaged surfaces, seeks to both mimic and counter the fractured, illuminated and seductive spaces of the screen, immersing the viewer in a physical and material engagement with colour and space.
Curran describes her relationship to colour as:
“A space that I can enter and build from, sometimes literally in terms of layered or three-dimensional forms and structures, but also in terms of a broader relationship with the world as I experience it. Colour functions as a placeholder, a sensory record of an encounter. It is both an organisation and a condensation of feeling and a marker or trace, like an afterglow that continues to travel beyond the original moment. I like to think of colour in this way, not simply in visual terms, but as a physical presence that we move through continuously. In this sense colour becomes a landscape.”
Fiona Curran's first exhibition with the gallery titled Map of Dusk opens June 6, 2024, from 6 - 8pm.