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“One slows down in the presence of art that has been crafted slowly by an artist who is herself an acute perceptor of time."
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FION GUNN
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Artist's Statement
Fion Gunn is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the connections between personal experience and the wider narratives of history. Working across painting, collage, installation and immersive media, she investigates how memory, landscape and cultural exchange shape the ways we understand ourselves and one another. Her practice is driven by curiosity and by a desire to uncover relationships that are often overlooked. Drawing on archives, literature, poetry, mythology and historical research, she follows unexpected connections across disciplines, cultures and time. Rather than treating history as a fixed narrative, Gunn approaches it as a living and evolving conversation in which multiple voices, perspectives and experiences coexist. Central to her work is the relationship between the intimate and the collective. Individual lives become points of entry into broader questions of migration, environmental change, cultural identity and the movement of people and ideas across generations. Increasingly, her work seeks to recover overlooked histories, particularly those of women, revealing how these stories continue to inform contemporary experience. Although grounded in painting, collage and sculpture, Gunn’s practice moves fluidly between material and digital forms. Each medium offers different ways to investigate shared questions, while research remains an essential part of her process—not as an end in itself, but as a means of discovering visual and poetic relationships that emerge through sustained enquiry. Literature, especially poetry, continues to shape both her thinking and her visual language. Collaboration is fundamental to Gunn’s practice. Working with artists, writers, scientists and other creative practitioners, she embraces interdisciplinary dialogue as a way of expanding both knowledge and imagination. Her work has increasingly explored how immersive technologies can create new forms of encounter while remaining rooted in materiality, metaphor and the physical act of making. Ultimately, Gunn’s work is concerned with connection: between past and present, landscape and memory, image and language, material and digital experience, and the countless individual stories that together shape our shared histories. Rather than offering fixed conclusions, her work invites viewers to slow down, to look closely, and to discover new relationships between people, places and ideas. “Gunn’s interweaving of ideas about migration and integration with her own life could not be more topical. The utility and thus the magnetism of collage and assemblage are Gunn’s syntax for an artistic language full of movement and exchange and vigour…” Emily de Wolfe Pettit Founder & Director, Peking Art Associates “She is constantly searching for unexpected connections and by incorporating these in her artworks, she creates a very different kind of literary ‘collage’, one which leads her to remember old worlds and discover new ones simultaneously.” Huang Du Curator |
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