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!'

This is 'Cork' the 4th panel in my artwork about Port Cities - I'm still thinking about the eventual title and of course, the next panel will be 'Shanghai' a city which I haven't stayed in since 2016 and one that I miss. I think that 'Cork' will have been the most difficult of the panels, the personal history is deeper and I've never been one to view the past through rose-tinted spectacles. However I hope that I've expressed something of the city where I was born and grew up, something not clichéd or trite.

Experience a visual and sound Roller Coaster created in Virtual Reality by me with a wonderful clapping soundtrack by composer Gráinne Mulvey!

This is a short film clip I made while travelling around my VR artwork called Odyssey: Ride. Currently part of the Boundless: Worlds in Flux project, it  is one of the artists' worlds which will be available in an interactive prototype shortly.
​
If you enjoy the experience please do like,subscribe and share!   Roller Coaster 2021 https://youtu.be/uzljx-yItPs

'My dreams are all my own' Fion Gunn 2021, acrylic, canvass, collage, gold leaf, 100 x 80cm