Assembly: Art in the Bar - Fiona Curran

About

Fiona Curran's paintings, collages and installations utilise colour, pattern and landscape imagery to conjure up imagined spaces that play with notions of the natural and the artificial, utopia and dystopia. The works are framed by an interest in the affect of advances in technology on our sense of perception as we increasingly encounter the world through the screen images of the television, computer, mobile phone, cinema and advertising. These media not only offer us 'action-at-a-distance' but they inundate us with saturated colour because of light behind and within the screen.

Curran's recent works engage with the utopian impulse within Modernism referencing geometric forms from this period in our contemporary history. Her geometries, in contrast to this, explode outwards in fractured bursts of colour; the forms folded over one another; the colours layered in order to 'contaminate' their purity through an embrace of heightened (artificial) colour.

For Chapter, Curran has worked directly on to the Caffi Bar walls to produce a site specific piece that is shown alongside alongside her recent paintings and veneered panels.

Biography:
Fiona Curran is an artist based in London and Manchester, initially studying for a degree in Philosophy at the University of Manchester before completing a BA and MA in the School of Art at MMU.

Recent projects include the essay, "The Space of Language", in the exhibition catalogue Anne Charnock: Certainty Suspended published by Castlefield Gallery (2008), a site-specific commission for Vital Arts at the Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel (2009), the launch of a collection with The Rug Company, London (2008), a one-year international artist's residency at The Florence Trust, London (2008-09) and a collaborative work with the Finnish sound artist, Marko Timlin as part of an exchange project between artists in Manchester and Helsinki in 2008. Forthcoming projects include a site-specific work for the Tatton Park Biennial 2010.