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Mark Fairnington Reader Biography Mark Fairnington, Reader in Painting at Wimbledon College, is an artist who has shown extensively in museums and private galleries in the US and Europe. Collaborative research projects with scientists have included Membracidae, funded by the Wellcome Trust; and an exhibition of Fairnington’s work, Fabu lous Beasts, was mounted at the Natural History Museum, London in 2004. In 2008, he was one of ten artists invited to produce designs for a ceiling in the NHM to mark the bicentenary of Charles Darwin; and his work was also included in A Duck for Mr Darwin – Evolutionary Thinking and The Struggle To Exist at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art. Unnatural History, January– March 2012, was a major retrospective exhibition of Fairnington’s work held in two venues – the Kunstverein and Galerie Peter Zimmermann, Mannheim, Germany. The exhibitions contained 51 works made during the period 1999–2012. Research statement Mark Fairnington’s
research has sustained a visual examination of the government and habits of speciation. Whether it be large-scale paintings of mounted insects, taxidermy displays of birds, portraits of prize stud bulls or the artistic and scientific language of flowers, his interest is resolutely in the eccentricities of the one required to stand in for all: the specimen. The research investi gates museum collections, their history, how specimens are housed, stored and displayed, and some of the possible relations between art and science. His paintings represent how we see nature through the diverse specimens held in these collections and how this seeing has changed over the centuries. He has found a space where taxonomical requirements have emerged in relationship with artistic ones. For him, the improvisatory role of painting, its capacity to produce plausible visual knowledge, is what makes this space and which allows his paintings to take on a collective form;
a series of nuanced allegories on the overlapping condition of democracy and typology. The natural world is like raw footage that the artist can script and reframe into a narrative of his own, using the syntax of the fantasist with as much veracity as that of the scientist. A recent output The Nature of the Beast / Our
Creatures, New Art Gallery, Walsall, 26 April – 30 June 2013. The Nature of the Beast was a group exhibition that featured Fairnington’s series of six life-sized paintings of prize-winning bulls. The process of making the paintings involved taking hundreds of photographs across the surface of the live animals, using these to build an impression of the texture and physicality of the animal. On inspection, the painting reveals itself as a construct of a range of fictions, not least man’s interventions regarding the breeding of these animals. The field is Art and Animals, and the key concern for the research is how representations of animals through painting, photography and taxidermy can describe, confront and challenge attitudes towards the natural world and the animal kingdom. Each of the artists makes works which involve an intensive scrutiny of animals and nature, as well as a critical engage ment with the ways in which we have attempted to understand and control the natural world. Within the same field and programme of work, Fairnington curated an historic exhibition entitled Our Creatures. This exhibition explored portraits of animals and offers glimpses into the ways in which artworks have described different relationships between human beings and animals. These are images and objects that depict, in particular, the domestic and local relationships between people and animals, and show how these can be pragmatic, eccentric, brutal and loving. Art works and objects were borrowed from Manchester City Art Gallery, Leeds Museums & Galleries, Compton Verney, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery and the Horniman Museum.