Dan Ferguson

I was born, educated, worked and lived in London until 2016, when I relocated to Northern Ireland. I was a secondary school teacher of Art and Media Studies for 14 years before embarking on the Masters in Fine Art course at University of Ulster. Both the move and the course were such an enriching change from such a huge metropolitan and urban life.

Although I taught art at school, I was starting very much from the beginning in 2016 on the Masters course. I had never really developed a body of work before, and I had to learn how to sequence my thoughts, inspiration, motivation to not just reflect my interests, but also to build a display that would work well in the eyes and minds of others.

I paint people and places, identities and souls. I always try to honour the spirit and history of a person or place. This can be stoic, political, romantic, playful, and terrifying. But I have to engage with the subject on a level beyond art. I am compelled to create a scene that I am moved by. It can range between whimsically beautiful, to dark and challenging situations.

I have explored memory and social/physical perception, and how we all affect each other with our experiences and stories, and observations. They can be spoken or visual. These memories can be mine, or belong to others, and they seem to be channelled into a colour scheme that tries to displace the conventional ‘sepia’ of nostalgia, and instead evoke a spectrum exploding timelessness. I try to be honest and tender with the memories and scenarios I create, but instead of words I try to achieve this with a mix of both powerful and subtle colour and forms.