Fionna Murray in conversation with Sarah Searson

Born in London, Fionna Murray studied at Chelsea College of Art (UAL), gaining a BA Honours in Painting. She moved to Ireland and studied for an MFA at the University of Ulster, Belfast in 1997. Her academic career as a lecturer in Painting has spanned 25 years between Galway ATU and Limerick TUS. She has exhibited nationally and internationally with work being represented in public and private collections in Ireland and abroad, including: The OPW State Collection; The Centre Cultural Irlandais; The University of Galway; The University of the Arts, London; Ballinglen Arts Foundation. Fionna lives and works in Galway and is a member of Artspace Studios.

Fiona Murray's practice engages with themes around memory and displacement and the experience of shifting sequences of lived time and places. She uses loosely connected images to create fragmentary worlds that are often concerned with boundaries and an ordering of forms within and across urban and rural thresholds. She’s interested in the matter of paint in and of itself, how it communicates and works to create mute spaces of pause and potential, whilst pursuing a feeling of ambiguity where moments of familiarity are charged with uncertainty. The paintings and drawings suppose more than explain becoming speculative places of transition in a negotiation between the materials and questions of reality and fiction.