Fiona Curran

Fiona Curran has donated three collaged works on paper from her Botanical Series (2018) for #100NHSRooms. Here she writes about the project that created them and her relationship with Barts Health NHS Trust:

“These works developed out of research undertaken for a temporary, site-specific public art commission – Your Sweetest Empire Is to Please – produced in 2018 at the National Trust estate of Gibside in Gateshead, North East England (commissioned by Newcastle University and The National Trust). The commission focused on the life of Mary Eleanor Bowes who lived at Gibside in the 18th century. It explored the hidden lives of women, botanical culture, plant collecting and the gendering of knowledge in the 18th century. Research undertaken revealed a large network of women who were exchanging plants and seeds and recording their observations in what has been referred to as an early form of feminist science. Excluded from University and unable to validate their knowledge via recognised public forums, women established alternative spaces for the exchange and circulation of information and ideas. The significance of women’s relationships to botany and plants has a long and overlooked history. It also permeated the decorative arts in the 18th century and enabled a number of women to practice creatively and to gain commercial independence as ‘designers’ when they were excluded from studying at art academies. An influential example local to East London is the Spitalfields silk designer Anna Maria Garthwaite. These collages gesture towards these entanglements between plants, landscape, the domestic interior, decorative design and the gendering of the spaces of production and presentation. They aim to celebrate overlooked aspects of women’s histories.

I worked with Vital Arts early in my career on my first public commission for a staff health and wellness centre at the Royal London Hospital. This project had a significant impact on my career and has informed the way that I have continued to work between studio and site-based public commissions. During the Covid-19 pandemic I discovered the #100NHSRooms project that they were running to provide artworks for NHS staff spaces. I knew immediately that I wanted to support the project, to make a small contribution to the lives of staff working under such demanding conditions and to say thank you. The works I have donated also have an indirect link to the history of the East End of London and its former significance as a centre for the production of silk in the 18th century.”

Fiona Curran, Untitled (Botanical Series), 2018, Acrylic on Paper with Card Collage

Two Fiona Curran works installed in the maternity bookings staff room at Newham Hospital, One installed in the Whipps Cross Outpatients quiet room