THE BEGINNING IS ALWAYS TODAY

A Workshop with Fion Gunn

Fion Gunn - My Dreams Are All My Own, 2021

In Liverpool University’s Education Hub, Fion Gunn sits down with Dr Eleanor Lybeck to discuss her work and to show three short-films developed over the past two years. The workshop comes as part of Gunn’s year-long residency with the Institute of Irish Studies at the University of Liverpool, which includes an exhibition of her work - Arrivals/Departures - at the Victoria Gallery & Museum.

The room has the sterile, almost hotel-esque design of many modern university buildings, and feels at total odds to the wild, organic work of Gunn and the deeply person-focused intentions behind the videos being shown. Gunn’s VR-video work (which accounts for two of the videos being shown at the event) is wonderfully textured and raw, at odds with the typically ultra-smooth quality that is so praised in such technologies. In We Breathe, the viewer is guided through one of Gunn’s “forests of transformation” – an intensely detailed VR forest that feels both ethereal and barren. The authentic human-touch that is so evident in Gunn’s paintings and sculptures is not lost in her digital creations, making them all the more engaging.

The three films being shown are all tributes to the activist author Mary Wollstonecraft, whose book Vindication of the Rights of Woman made a seismic impact on Gunn when she read it as a girl growing up in Ireland. The audience at the workshop is asked to interact with the artist and interviewer, and much of the interjecting conversation centres on Maggi Hambling’s For Mary Wollstonecroft sculpture unveiled in 2020 – and a consensus is found that it entirely missed the mark. One exclamation neatly summed up the discussion of exacerbated voices – “well, she’s a Tory isn’t she?”

Fion’s 2021 painting My Dreams Are All My Own  – the focus of the first of the short films – was made in reaction to Hambling’s sculpture. The artist explains that on seeing For Mary Wollstoncroft for the first time, she was “horrified… I thought it embodied everything that Mary Wollstonecraft would have despised” and that it was her “duty as an artist who was positively affected by her” to make an artwork herself. Gunn discusses how much of the underlayer of this painting (and most of her other works) is guided by “the element of chance” and that it was this process that determined the form of the central figure. The watery red paint that glides and drips on the canvas appears almost like menstrual blood, adding another conceptual layer to the painting.

Around the central figure are collaged images from books and magazines, representing the women and girls of the world in their search for “education, literacy, and protest”. In the background a graph maps the percentage of female to male authors over the past 100 years, a statistic that Gunn believes Wollstonecraft would have found significant – heartening in its upward trend, but disappointing in quite how long it is taking. Lybeck’s first question to Gunn is “why these women?’ to which Gunn explains quite how arduous her collage-research stage is, given that the vast majority of female figures in printed material are either advertising a product, or seen in a group with their children or husbands. The children collaged in My Dreams Are All My Own include Rajasthani girls following a cataclysmic earthquake, and Kurdish women in the PKK. The artist’s own grandmother fought in the Irish Civil War as part of the IRA: protest is in Gunn’s marrow. She summarises her rage aptly – “at the end of every revolution, the women are sent back to the kitchen”.

Gunn’s work is alluringly other – it demands close-viewing and is brought to life by discussion and multifaceted engagement – in many ways totally anti- what the various social media algorithms want. One feels that viewing Gunn’s work online in comparison to seeing it in person (perhaps more so than for other artists who work mono-materially) is like the difference between reading a thrilling play and seeing it performed live by world-class actors. Gunn’s explanation of her works and discussion about her practice in this workshop brings her pieces into a new dimension and invigorates them. Hearing her speak gives you insight into how much of her magnetic wit is sewn into her work. Gunn’s analysis of the world is scalpel-sharp and to be privy to her thought processes is truly special.