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 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 recently had his first solo show, ‘Swedger Island’, at Glasgow’s StrangeField.
Artist Statement
My practice uses painting, drawing, film, and installation to examine my lived experiences as a semi-hallucinatory folk memory. Working in oil paint, charcoal, airbrush, and filmic installation, I explore binaries of the pictorial and textual, the poetical and mundane, the real and imagined, in turn dialoguing with the alleged schizophrenic splitting of the Scottish psyche under the theory of Caledonian Antisyzygy.
Central to my process is creative writing, where fictions become actualised as physical objects, primarily as paintings but also as sculpture, artefact, or simulacrum.
By scavenging online media – YouTube rips, phone footage, and game textures – I rebuild scenes from lived and imagined experience, staging them through recurring fictional motifs. My practice sits between confession and invention: autobiographical material is performed, altered, and reimagined to highlight the unreliability of personal and collective memory.
My recent project, Swedger Island, contains the unravelling narrative of an imagined Scottish music festival and a questionable narrator's account of it. A looping film shown in a gazebo, paintings, monumental drawings, and ephemeral festival sculptures together render a collective Scottish hauntology as a multidisciplinary, self-examining pseudo-mythology.
My current project examines my profession as a chef, by drawing kitchen scenes from memory and developing these into oil paintings, alongside an ongoing literary project titled 'Burnt Peaches'. The kitchen becomes a natural site for this enquiry: a microcosm of late-capitalist pressures, where binaries of artistry and consumption, exploitation and growth, fracture and divide the self endlessly. Somewhere between the real and the half-remembered is where the work emerges.
CV
Exhibitions
A Rose is a Rose and is not a Rose, StrangeField, Group Show, Glasgow, 2026
Swedger Island, StrangeField, Solo Show, Glasgow, 2025
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