Bio
Chris J Farrell was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1994, where he lives and works. He studied BA Painting at Gray’s School of Art, graduating in 2018, where he received a runner-up prize for the BP Fine Art Award. After his undergraduate studies, he received a mentorship bursary from the New Art School (NAS) in 2022 and subsequently joined Glasgow School of Art’s MFA programme, graduating in 2024. He has exhibited both locally and internationally, including a recent show at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg (HFBK), curated by Martin Boyce and Graham Ramsay. In 2025, he was shortlisted for the Freelands Foundation Fellowship at the Belfast School of Art (Ulster University) and is working on his first self-funded solo show at Glasgow’s StrangeField.
Artist Statement
Chris J. Farrell’s practice uses painting, drawing, film, and installation to examine contemporary Scotland as a digitally embedded, hallucinatory folk memory. He works in oil painting and charcoal drawing alongside contemporary modes like airbrush, modelling paste, digital collage and filmic installation. By scavenging online media – YouTube rips, phone footage, and game textures – he rebuilds scenes from lived and imagined experience, staging them through recurring fictional figures, including Dr Euan Onyett and the vanished student Rory Byrne. His practice sits between confession and invention: autobiographical material is performed, altered, and reimagined to highlight the unreliability of personal and collective experience in our digitised age.
Farrell’s upcoming project, Swedger Island, depicts an unravelling narrative of an imagined Scottish music festival and an uncertain narrator’s account, anchoring his autofiction in an exhibition setting. A looping film shown in a gazebo. alongside paintings, monumental drawings, and a ‘merch’ stall installation renders a collective Scottish hauntology as a multidisciplinary, self-examining pseudo-mythology.
CV
Exhibitions
Swedger Island, StrangeField, Glasgow, 2025 (upcoming solo)
Glasgow School of Art MFA Degree Show, Glue Factory, Glasgow, 2024
HFBK GSA, HFBK, Hamburg, 2024
HFBK GSA, Glue Factory, Glasgow, 2023
Glasgow School of Art MFA Interim Show, Glue Factory, Glasgow, 2023
Storytellers Festival, Glue Factory, Glasgow, 2022
NAS Student Exhibition, Online, 2022
Dornoch Street Studios Group Exhibition, Glasgow, 2022
NAS Interim Show, Online, 2022
Dornoch Street Studios Group Exhibition, Glasgow, 2020
Altered States, Rogart Street Campus, Glasgow, 2018
Gray’s School of Art Degree Show, Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen, 2018
Gray’s School of Art Pre-Degree Show, St Margaret’s Hall, Edinburgh, 2017
Below the Beams, MUSA, Aberdeen, 2017
Looking Forward, Pentland Fine Art Gallery, Aberdeen, 2016
Other
Scottish Landscape Awards, longlisted, 2025
Freelands Foundation Fellowship, shortlisted, Belfast, 2025
Dr Euan Onyett Academic Presentation, RE:Present, Glasgow School of Art, 2024
A Gift I Didn’t Realise I Needed, artist-led book, 2021
BP Fine Art Award, runner-up, 2018
Education
Glasgow School of Art, Master of Fine Art (MFA), 2022–2024
New Art School, Contemporary Painting Mentorship (bursary award), 2021–2022
Gray’s School of Art, BA (Hons) Painting, 2014–2018