The solo exhibition Jump Cut, Still Life at the Broadway Gallery, Letchworth Garden City (2021) presents a series of painted and textile works exploring landscape and the impacts of screen-based technologies on our sensory engagement with the natural world. The works exhibited developed from research into the long history of women’s engagement with plants and early feminist scientific practices rooted in embodied forms of knowledge. This research joined Curran’s lockdown experience of recuperating from long-Covid in her own garden, witnessing plants growing, observing insects and birds visiting, mapping the subtle changes in temperature and light through drawings, tapestry weavings and fabric collages. The exhibition records this experience of slowing down and is a material testimony to the process of paying attention to the changing of the seasons through an embodied and sensory engagement with place. It also reflects more broadly on notions of loss and change at a human and non-human scale. The abstract and collaged grounds of the works exhibited mimic and counter the saturated spaces of the screen whilst evoking the formal and utopian qualities of Modernism and the desire to continually order and re-order the world. Research for the exhibition also drew directly from Letchworth and the utopian histories of the Garden City movement. Several works include a direct reference to botanical forms that surface as bleached-out, ghostly presences. These fragments from nature are invoked in an attempt to preserve and celebrate their forms whilst suggesting larger narratives of ecological loss and sensorial impoverishment resulting from the increased dependence on optical, screen-based technologies. Curran also produced a site-specific wall painting within the town that ran alongside the exhibition as an off-site project.
https://www.broadway-letchworth.com/studio-gallery/FionaCurran