F I O N A F I N N E G A N
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Fiona Finnegan is a Belfast-based painter whose work explores memory, ritual, and the spectral nature of images. Her practice evolved through process and necessity rather than formal training - she began painting on found wood, drawn to its weathered surfaces and traces of previous lives. Over time, layering and sanding became central to her method, a rhythm of revealing and concealing that mirrors the instability of memory itself. Now working primarily on linen, a material bound to her family’s history in the Irish linen mills, she finds a quiet continuity between manual labour and the labour of remembering. Finnegan grew up in a religious Catholic community in the shadow of the Ring of Gullion, a volcanic landscape steeped in myth and superstition on the Irish border, during the Troubles. That charged terrain, marked by fear, violence, ritual, and unseen histories, continues to inform her sensibility. Her paintings often evoke the threshold between the familiar and the uncanny, where beauty and unease coexist. Her influences draw from film, folklore, and music - from Tarkovsky’s Mirror and Hitchcock’s The Birds to The Wicker Man, Midsommar, and the melancholic undercurrents of 1970s folk rock. Light, shadow, and rhythm act as structuring forces within her compositions, shaping atmospheres that feel suspended between time and dream. For Finnegan, painting is a form of song and a kind of film: each work part of a continuum, unfolding through rhythm, repetition, and return. The act of painting becomes a way to hold time, to gather and sustain what endures beneath the surface. Her images move like verses or scenes, linked by tone and atmosphere rather than narrative, each one resonating with another across time. In this interplay of sound and image, memory and imagination, Finnegan’s paintings assert their own quiet permanence, moments not passing but continuing to reverberate. Finnegan has exhibited extensively across the UK, Ireland, and internationally. Her work has featured in thematically charged group exhibitions such as Waking the Witch (Legion Projects), Ashes Denote What Fire Was at Fortnight Institute, New York, and Generation 2022 at Butler Gallery, Kilkenny. She has been the recipient of multiple Arts Council of Northern Ireland awards, and her work is held in public and private collections, including the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and the University of Ulster.