This episode was recorded at The Black Box Theatre and Studios in Galway. Home to Artspace and The Galway Arts Festival.
In this conversation, Sarah and Fionna Murray unfold her practice back through five decades from post-punk Manchester to Chelsea and Belfast. They speak about early chapters of Murray's biography, which is her largely undocumented work in music promotion. Murray co-ran an independent club that gave Echo & the Bunnymen an early Manchester gig before losing the venue due to licensing laws. Returning to London, Murray co-founded a club in a King's Cross pub that hosted The Pogues' first performances. However, ultimately this work redirected her toward painting via evening classes at St Martin's.
Fionna’s Artspace Studio is overlooking the Corrib, its window framing the university's spire and the slow churn of river traffic. Fionna Murray is quietly assembling one of the more psychologically dense bodies of work to emerge in Irish painting. Her practice is built on distillation and stillness and its close confessional scale.
Murray's current painting cycle has its origins in Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 film Blow-Up, a work she first encountered on television in 1980s London. The film's central setting, a park whose manicured wildness stands in for a kind of constructed rurality within the city. This, for Murray, became a proxy for something more autobiographical: the negotiated inheritance of being raised in London by parents from Donegal and Mayo. The urban furniture of municipal parks; railings, oval beds, and park flowers became motifs recurring across the new paintings. They are drawn as much from Antonioni's mise-en-scène as from the artist's own material archaeology. Murray uses twisted paper handles salvaged from shopping bags, cellophane flower wrappers, and tissue paper to assemble her own park-like installations first shown at Galway's 126 Gallery and later at Limerick City Gallery, in an exhibition curated by Sarah Searson. Curiously, the Limerick gallery itself is set within a Victorian public park whose iron railings supplied an uncanny echo of her imagery.
Following her degree at Chelsea College of Art in London, Murray undertook an MFA in Belfast, a change from the more austere, abstraction ethos of her London training, a move which re-opened the door to figuration in her practice. Fellow students and friends from that Belfast cohort include the painter Brian Fay and the late Des Ward, who introduced Murray to the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh, which remains a touchstone. A subsequent group exhibition at Dublin's Rubicon Gallery led Murray toward Galway, where she built a long teaching career at ATU, alongside a studio practice sustained through Artspace Studios.
Literary and art-historical reference points anchor the new paintings' sense of theatrical stillness. For example, Ludwig Bemelmans's Madeleine books, with their flourished cursive script, neatly lined characters and loose, whimsical ink work and strict discipline of structure, point to the spirit of curiosity in Murray's work. Maeve Brennan's novella The Visitor lent one painting its title, The Neat Black Flowerbeds; and a 1547–1619 miniature by Nicholas Hilliard, Young Man Among Roses, a striking romantic young swain, a bramble-bound, oval-framed figure resonates with Murray's own compositional logic of enclosure and wildness. Hiroshi Sugito is also cited as a touchstone for the pared-back, theatrical spareness of Murray's sensibility. She cites Piero della Francesca's Baptism of Christ in London's National Gallery as a formative work of reference.
Since retiring from full-time teaching in 2024, Murray has entered what she describes as a newly unbroken period of studio focus, one in which the fractured motifs of childhood, migration, and constructed landscape are being worked, patiently, into paint.
Fionna Murray's Portrait is courtesy of Joanne O’Brien
Links:
Fionna Murray's Website
Fionna Murray Instagram
Artspace Studios
126 Gallery
Limerick City Gallery of Art
