UH Arts + Culture are thrilled to present Static – a solo exhibition of new work by artist Fiona Curran.
Moving between small-scale intimate works and large-scale installations, the exhibition explores the impacts of screen-based technologies on the decline of our sensory engagement with the world.
Series and repetition play a significant role in Curran’s practice through iterations of colour, material, scale and arrangement. The artist’s persistent use of a heightened colour palette and her assembled, layered surfaces both mimic and counter the fractured, illuminated, and seductive spaces of the screen. The viewer is immersed in a physical and material encounter 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.”
The exhibition’s title, Static, refers to the paradox of our contemporary moment; we can travel anywhere at any time via the screen without the need to move from the same spot. This results in a form of inactivity and a reduction of our full sensory experience, condensed by the optical smoothness of backlit transmission. The artist’s transformation of the gallery using colour and materials asks us to move beyond the notion of static as a state of inertness towards its alternative meanings as a form of interference and agitation.
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About Fiona Curran
Fiona Curran (b.1971 Manchester) works with painting, textiles and installation exploring the poetics of landscape space and the impacts of screen technologies on our sensory engagement with the world.
Curran 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.
The artist has exhibited widely, including exhibitions at Chapter Gallery, Cardiff; MAC, Birmingham; Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge; The Hatton Gallery, Newcastle; Phoenix Gallery, Exeter; Oriel Mostyn, Llandudno; David Dale Gallery, Glasgow; Ed.Varie New York; RMIT, Melbourne and The Cable Factory, Helsinki.
Curran recently completed a permanent public art commission with the Contemporary Art Society for Turing Locke in Eddington, Cambridge, and has worked on site-specific projects for The National Trust, The Forestry Commission and Vital Arts.
Curran’s exhibition The Slack Shallows at 5 Howick Place, London, runs concurrently with her exhibition at UH Arts + Culture.