graduate school directory 2011/12 - Camberwell College of Arts ...

104 fAIRNINGTON Mark
fAIRNINGTON Mark
READER
BiOgrAPhY Mark Fairnington is a Reader
in Painting at Wimbledon College and his practice
explores the lineage of animal and plant
painting and its relation to the history of human
understanding of the natural world. It focuses
on the image of natural history specimens in collections,
storage and display. Collaborative
research projects with scientists have included
Membracidae, funded by the Wellcome Trust.
Fairnington and Dr George McGavin travelled to
the Las Cuevas Research Station in Belize to
study treehoppers and this insect’s use of mimetic
camouflage as a survival mechanism. A major
exhibition of Fairnington’s work, Fabulous Beasts,
was mounted at the Natural History Museum,
London in 2004. Birds We Cannot See, funded by
the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, involved
working with scientists in the NHM Department
of Zoology to study and record specimens of
Birds of Paradise from the skins collection and in
historical and contemporary displays.
CUrrENt rESEArCh Fairnington’s research
is founded on painting as its primary method of
research. It examines the idea that the cultural
meaning of the images generated by different disciplines
can be determined by narratives that
lie outside the field. These are diverse narratives,
some of which emerge and are explored during
the making of a painting, where description, its
attention to detail, gained through studied
and intense observation, can become a platform
for speculation and storytelling. Two recent
series of works are The Bulls and Flora. The Bulls are
life-sized paintings of prize-winning stock bulls
that open up connections between the history of
animal portraiture, the economy of selective
livestock breeding and how this determines physical
characteristics of the animals. Flora is
a series of paintings that imagine new hybrid
plants, referencing genetic engineering,
the history of flower painting and botanical
illustration.
SELECtED OUtPUtS AND AChiEVEMENtS
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2011 flora, Oliver Sears Gallery, Dublin.
2010 Bull Market, Bury St Edmunds Art Gallery, Suffolk.
2009 Private Collection, Galerie Peter Zimmermann,
Mannheim.
2008 Galerie Peter Zimmermann, Mannheim.
2007 Dynasty, Art Agents, Hamburg.
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2010 Blood Tears faith Doubt, Courtauld Gallery,
The Courtauld Institute of Art.
2010 Profusion, Calke Abbey, Derbyshire.
2009 The Artist's Studio, Compton Verney, touring to
the Sainsbury Centre, Norwich.
2009 A Duck for Mr Darwin, BALTIC Centre for
Contemporary Art.
2008 War and Medicine, Wellcome Trust, London.
2008 Darwin’s Canopy, Natural History Museum.
2007 Bird Watching, curated by Tanya Rumpff, the fish
Market, Haarlem.
2007 Bloedmoo, The Historic Museum, Rotterdam.
2007 Bloody Beautiful, Gallery Ron Mandos, Rotterdam.
SELECTED BOOKS AND EDITIONS
2009 flora, text by Adrian Rifkin, Oliver Sears Gallery,
Dublin.
2009 The Artist’s Studio, Giles Waterfield, G. (ed.),
Hogarth Arts and Compton Verney.
2009 A Duck for Mr Darwin, Evolutionary Thinking and
the Struggle to Exist, BALTIC.
2008 Arkive City, University of Ulster, Belfast.
2008 Bloedmooi/ Bloody Beautiful, Historical Museum,
Rotterdam.
2006 Experience and Experiment, Calouste Gulbenkian
foundation.
Mark fairnington, Coucal Cattleya, oil on panel, 70 × 65 cm, 2011
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