Marion Flanagan

Marion Flanagan is a Canadian artist currently working in Toronto and London, UK. She moved to London in 2017 and has recently completed her MA Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London (UAL). Flanagan has shown her work extensively in the UK, France, and Canada. Her work moves between sculpture and painting, considering the materiality of the chosen medium and its potential for narrative expression.

At the moment, Flanagan’s practice investigates the fragile relationship between humans and nature, the uses and abuses of resources and spaces, and the attempt to define areas of commonality between the bodies of human beings and the substances of the natural world. This research takes in a broad range of specialisms from geography to politics to biology. An insistence on the analysis of petroleum has emerged from recent works, in sculpture and painting. Using synthetic rubber, concrete, steel and acrylic, she references the movement of toxic materials through the natural world to our domestic lives. In painting, Flanagan uses monoprinting as a primary structure on the canvas, and then builds texture and colour in slow abstract forms. The resulting paintings seem by turns industrial and natural; reminiscent of terrain-mapping, surfaces of water, pollution, or images from a microscope or drone camera.

As a result, Flanagan’s work expresses an attempt to reveal the impact of our actions at a local and global level. In the end, she encourages us to act with kindness, and proposes a world that treats our environments and fellow citizens with more consideration, empathy, and openness.