Metropolitan Pastoral
Fionna Murray
25th June 2019 until July 16th 2019
Artist Bio
Fionna Murray was born and grew up in London. She studied at Chelsea College of Art and graduated in 1995 with BA Honours in Painting. She moved to Ireland to study for a Master of Fine Art at University of Ulster, Belfast, graduating in 1997.
Now living in Galway she divides her time between her own studio work and lecturing on the BA Contemporary Art programme at GMIT. She has exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions including Emma Hill Eagle Gallery, London; Wilson Stephens Jones, London; Rubicon Gallery, Dublin; The Dock, Carrick on Shannon; Metis-NL ,Amsterdam. She is represented by Emma Hill Eagle Gallery, London.
Artist Statement
Metropolitan Pastoral presents recent work by Fionna Murray, made in response to the film Blow Up, directed in London in 1966 by Michelangelo Antonioni. A central motif of the film is an ordinary city park which contrasts sharply with surrounding scenes of streets, shops, fashion models and music clubs of the time. The shifting relationship between urban and rural (albeit the rural of a landscaped park), uncovered for Murray, a dislocation between the familiarity of London where she grew up (and now partly in her imagination), and the west of Ireland where she lives today, (and where her own parents left in the 1950’s for work and another life in London).
The lucid yet enigmatic nature of Blow Up served as a framework of images for an investigation into personal ambiguities concerning memory and displacement, whilst providing a filter through which the physical practice of painting might address notions of home. The paintings in this exhibition then, look both ways between here and there and also hang between generations in mute recognition of the impossibility of return.
Metropolitan Pastoral will be opened by Poet in Residence at the Yeats Society, Sligo, Alice Lyons.
