Fionnuala Quinn is an artist from Northern Ireland. Her abstract-figurative style is concerned with bodies in motion, impermanent spaces and dramatic subtext. She studied Theatre design at Wimbledon School of Art and worked in costume for theatre, contemporary dance and at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London for many years during which time she also studied Asian art and critical theory at SOAS, University of London. She has a long standing drawing practice, nurtured at the Royal Drawing School, Shoreditch, London. After returning to Ireland permanently in 2021, the artist settled in Galway where she now lives and works. She exhibited in Gallery126, Galway City, member’s show in 2024 and is currently in residence at the James Mitchell Geology Museum at Galway University.
The toxicity of art materials is a concern, so my preference is for those that are stable and those that can be cleaned through a filtering process. I love good paper as it is hospitable to rough treatment. An artwork is likely to be set aside for many months until I am ready to ‘manually’ rethink the idea again after a period of further research and a bit of emotional turmoil. Time is a key subject – from the different speeds of making art to the deep time represented below our feet. A hyperreal botanical drawing is clearly not the thing in itself but it has a strange truth made from slow work. The depicted momentary movement of a body and the lifespan of that human become a speedy dance on the page, quickly made. The space where abstraction moves to figuration and back again provides somewhere in between where form and formlessness can translate between thought, image and word. The painter Joan Mitchell speaking about art : …it’s feeling your existence. It’s not just survival. Painting is a means of feeling ‘living’. I like this.
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