Fflur Donnghaile

Her practice encompasses painting, drawing, participatory interventions, site specific works and installations, film & photography. Her painting revels in colour, gesture, texture, with scratched out mark making and both abstract and figurative images. She works in oils and incorporates natural materials and household paints.

Committed to painting in her studio - she explores themes such as the Irish diaspora and Famine, displacement and loss, social justice and reparation, feminism and mythologies, poverty, industrialisation, working-class identity, and the housing crisis.

Her drawings and works on paper have an intimacy and immediacy that speaks to childhood experiences of neglect and trauma, but which also confidently anchor emotions in the here and now. Drawing as catharsis opens space to reflect and heal, and to regain a certain playfulness.

Pushed to be academic as a child coming from a northern, deprived council estate, she has oscillated between the worlds of Art and Law/ Politics. Acting to translate people’s trauma and experiences of injustice into legal advocacy and formal policy language felt like a loss of humanity, flattening contradictions, nuance, and complexity. She uses an investigative approach to interrog...

BA Hons Mixed Media Fine Art, University of Westminster