Lisa Fenton O’Brien

Lisa studied Expressive Arts at Brighton Polytechnic in the 1980s leading to her having a multidisciplinary practice including sculpture and music composition. She began her Master Fine Arts at Psalter Lane Art College, Sheffield Hallam University and after moving up to the Highlands mid course completed her MFA in 2007 at Grays School of Art, Aberdeen focussing on sound and video. 

She has won several awards including a Princes Youth Trust composers award, Hi-Arts awards to develop new work and an Arts and Humanities Research Council bursary for her MFA studies. In 2006 she was selected as Scottish Arts Council artist of the month and she has travelled to Japan with an installation piece Disturbance that also toured to galleries in Denmark, Japan and France with An Tuirean Gallery, Skye. Her video work has travelled internationally as part of groups shows including with New Media Scotland and has also been shown at Leeds International Film Festival. She has taken part in several residencies including as part of Sound Scotland festival and also with London Fieldworks and on Resonance FM as part of Remote Performances. This also resulted in a essay publication in 'In Search of Silence' and 'On Remoteness' published in Remote Performances in Nature and Architecture edited by Gilchrist, Jolson and Warr.

My current work focuses on drawing and painting. There is a figurative aspect to my recent work and it is heavily influenced by the dramatic weather and wild landscape of the remote North West Highlands where I have lived for the past 20 years. There is also an ongoing abstract and conceptual aspect to my practice. The gestures I use in my work are instinctive responses to what I see and hear and also expressions of an inner emotional  landscape and I am currently experimenting with ways of physically incorporating the weather conditions into my work often making the work outside using found materials.