I'm planning an installation 'Fleet' for this exhibition in October 2023 and I will also show other work including Black Box, 2022, mixed media  88 x 44 x 70cm (When open)

​I found this box on the side of the road, unpainted and damaged. It had held things it was misshapen, it had the marks of life on it.
I knew immediately that I had to make an ‘infinity scape’ inside it, to expand its internal dimensions and explore a complex narrative.

The two coastlines are approximations of Dublin bay, the mouth of the Liffey and its port, and that of Liverpool, its docklands and the Mersey. 

My idea was to envisage sister coastlines and think about the connections running alongside the oppositional relationship between Britain and Ireland. Liverpool was the city to which so many Irish people came, fleeing poverty, famine, the shame of unwanted pregnancies and the lack of opportunities for women in general. However, many found the sense of displacement, the negative implications of being Irish in Britain ghettoised them emotionally and spiritually.

As I created these coasts, war broke out in Ukraine and I felt impelled to address the wider implications of displacement, the legacies of conflict the relationship between the invaded and the invaders. and so the artwork evolved to include the traces of destruction, the tools of war and forced migration.

The scale is simultaneously tiny and vast, intimate and universal. I want to tell these stories in a way that attracts the viewer to spend time looking and thinking while being respectful of peoples’ suffering and not gratuitously voyeuristic.

You may not be able to come to my exhibition in Liverpool 30 July - 23 December
however, if you’d like to see my 3D artworks in the flesh ‘virtually speaking’
download the app now and view them anywhere you like!
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The Arrivals/Departures app is now available FREE from:
AppStore: https://apps.apple.com/.../arrivals-departures/id1622404266
or
Google: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details

This is an excerpt from the immersive installation (from the floor projection) which is a key part of the exhibition at Victoria Gallery & Museum - 30 July - 23 Dec 2022. 

​This is the first event in Gunn’s year-long residency with Liverpool’s Institute of Irish Studies which launched on the 31st of March 2022 at Victoria Gallery & Museum.
In conversation with Dr Richard Benjamin, Head of the International Slavery Museum, Liverpool, Gunn will present her film ‘Child of our Time’ – a tribute to Eavan Boland and display some mixed media artworks which address the experience of women at times of war and its aftermath – the collateral lives of collateral victims.
Gunn and Benjamin, currently visiting professor at University of Liverpool, will explore their many touchpoints and their shared commitment to advocate for meaningful public engagement.
Describing the impact of Boland’s writing on her own work Fion Gunn remarked “Eavan Boland, was an inspirational and under-recognised Irish poet. I first read her poem 'Child of our Time' as a 15 year old, after the terrible bombing in Dublin in which three babies were killed. It has stayed with me ever since.”
On 9 June 2022 from 7pm-8.30pm at TR4, Building 502 Teaching Hub, Mount Pleasant, Liverpool L69 3GR (map attached)
Fion will explore different perspectives of war and conflict, as an artist, a curator, childhood experience and the legacy of family.
The audience is warmly invited to join the conversation.

​Free tickets available on Eventbrite: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/349928915807/

 Date:    Wednesday 15 June 2022 from 7pm-8.30pm
Venue:   TR4, Building 502 Teaching Hub, Mount Pleasant, Liverpool L69 3GR (map below)

This is the first event in Gunn’s year-long residency with Liverpool’s Institute of Irish Studies which launched on the 31st of March 2022 at Victoria Gallery & Museum.

Fion will present her film ‘Child of our Time’ – a tribute to Eavan Boland and display some mixed media artworks which address the experience of women at times of war and its aftermath – the collateral lives of collateral victims.

Describing the impact of Boland’s writing on her own work Fion Gunn remarked “Eavan Boland, was an inspirational and under-recognised Irish poet. I first read her poem 'Child of our Time' as a 15 year old, after the terrible bombing in Dublin in which three babies were killed. It has stayed with me ever since.”
​
Fion will explore different perspectives of war and conflict, as an artist, a curator, childhood experience and the legacy of family.
The audience is warmly invited to join the conversation.

Lifeboat is one of Gunn's 3D works which will be featured in the Arrivals/Departures exhibition at Victoria Gallery & Museum 30 July - 23 December this year has now been scanned by the Photogrammetry Team at the University of Liverpool.

This allows the artist to incorporate the 3D models in the immersive video installation planned for the exhibition. It will also feature as a pop-up in the planned Augumented Reality art trail of her work throughout the city.

It's been two years since I began this artwork with the first panel 'Venice' - two years during which the world has changed radically for everyone and I feel very lucky that my life as an artist has kept me on an even keel (I just can't seem to avoid the shipping references!) This is a pretty large artwork, I haven't got a wall long enough to photograph it and I probably won't get to see it assembled until it's hanging in the Victoria Gallery & Museum in Liverpool next year. Each of the panels represents an exploration of the five port cities through many lenses: history, environment, literature, architecture, the natural world and the stories of people. Of course, it is an intensely personal exploration and my responses to those cities may be shared by some viewers and not at all by others, it is a poetic and imagined journey and hopefully will spark that journey in those who come to see it. 

Just finished the 'Shanghai' panel for my ongoing work about port cities. Shanghai is a beguiling city with a long and complex history and mindboggling urban planning, I have woven many stories and reinterpreted locations in this canvas. NB The birds featured in all the panels have been the source of a lot of research months of intensive 'cutting out'! I consult the website www.avibase.bsc-eoc.org when checking on which species can be found in each city. Once they've been added to the painting I instantly forget their names!!!!
It's now almost 2 years since I began the project and I'm giving myself until mid November to finish the final .and  smaller panels for above and below 'Venice'. This will be one of the artworks featured in 'Arrivals/Departures' my solo show at the Victoria Gallery & Museum, Liverpool in Autumn 2022. Here's the artwork gradually taking shape below:

Not quite finished yet but almost.....I started planning 'Lifeboat' about 2 years ago, gathering the materials, thinking about how to express all the feelings and narratives which underpin it. It's largely made from materials that were thrown away, left out for recycling, not valued - but they were, by me....
A broken globe which I could carve, a broken oud left outside a house in South London discovered during lockdown walks, wooden spatulas from Poundland. I combined these elements with 'books' which I made from painted papers and foam core, a 3D print of a scan of myself - thanks to VR artist Sean Rodrigo and many sheets of gold foil a gift from Eliza Cooey.

Assembling the elements of this work has taken many months - often using techniques that were unfamiliar and not easy.

It's not quite finished yet and the next headache is how to photograph it, because none of the surfaces I have in the studio is the right fit! These photos show a cobbled together solution. Once I find a way of creating the right surface I will re photograph and film it.

That's all the tech side of things - what about the meaning you may ask?
Well, the books represent the things that have happened to me, the stories that have shaped my life, the library which contains them is my own life, it is lined with gold because the world of books, the stories of all of us, is such a precious one. The oud is an Arabic instrument which I love - the name itself means wood, the miniature golden forest represents the forest of transformation provided by books, art and music.  Just like some of my previous works 'Lifeboat' is about the inescapable link between trees, wood, paper and written stories -  how important it is to 'plant more trees!'