Visual Art: Geography Is Important by Fergus FitzGerald

Sirius Arts Centre presents Geography Is Important by Fergus FitzGerald, open until 28 June 2025.

Fergus FitzGerald is based in the Carrick-on-Suir facilities of Camphill Communities of Ireland and has a studio at their affiliate, KCAT Arts Centre in Callan, which supports artists who self-identify, or are identified, as neurodivergent. He has been practicing for about fifteen years and has created an extensive body of painting and writing.

Geography Is Important surveys FitzGerald’s practice and is the most comprehensive presentation of his work to date. It features works made between 2012 and 2024 that showcase territories, landmarks, everyday scenes, people and more, with inscribed narratives and reflections. It facilitates a critical review of his practice, repositioning and furthering his idiosyncratic voice within the Irish art scene.

Fergus FitzGerald is an excursionist to lands familiar and foreign. His art is informed by his travels across the world, mainly Europe and often Italy. Some of them are real, but the majority are imaginary – he draws connections between locations he has visited with his family and others he wishes to visit in the future, mixing reflection and description with fiction. He leverages geography as a mode to explore his engagement with his own milieu and the wider social sphere, forging an intersection between his interior world and the exterior one.

FitzGerald’s paintings and drawings meld lived experience with research conducted online and through expansive reading, to which the artist adds his own thinking and anecdotes drawn from popular culture. Regarding subject matter, he is largely concerned with urban scenarios, and he mostly paints landmarks – heritage sites, palaces, hotels, squares, streets, bridges and more – combining his curiosity about, and impressions of, sites of interest. His style is characterised by broad brushstrokes and streaks of acrylic paint – his preferred and most employed medium – that render his vision with immediacy and energy.

FitzGerald layers onto his compositions writing that fuses historical and geographical facts with personal reflections, blending in commentary or explanation. The words seem to emerge from streams of consciousness and convey accounts informed by both his life experiences and imaginings.

FitzGerald narrativises himself as a central protagonist within the universe he creates, speculatively using the self, whether manifest through his body or his mind. He often chronicles himself in the third person, an approach that imbues the work with diaristic subjectivity while maintaining a degree of documentary authority.

This is FitzGerald’s first exhibition organised independently from a disability-specific remit. It results from a five-year engagement between the artist, the Sirius Arts Centre team and selected staff at KCAT Arts Centre.

Geography Is Important is produced by Sirius Arts Centre and curated by Miguel Amado, Director and Sarah Long, Programme Producer.

For more information, visit siriusartscentre.ie

Text by Sirius Arts Centre.