Urban Landscapes is a body of work created without boundaries or fixed rules, embracing creative freedom and open interpretation. Fluid, expressive, and imaginative, it explores colour, texture, and design as a means of navigating and escaping the realities and challenges of the contemporary world.

The exhibition reflects Fiona O’Brien’s experience as a long-time Ballymun resident, documenting and responding to the constant construction, transformation, and evolution of the environment around her. Influenced by urban living, music, nature, weather, culture, diversity, architecture, developing spaces, and punk aesthetics, the work captures the energy, movement, and complexity of everyday life.

This collection also serves as a deeply personal reflection on change following the loss of two important people in her life: her father, Eddie O’Brien, and mherbrother-in-law, Fergus McSweeney. Through the process of making, she explores themes of love, loss, grief, resilience, movement, and renewal.

Returning to painting as her primary artistic practice allowed Fiona O’Brien to step back from the digital world and reconnect with her first creative passion: working directly with paint on canvas. While digital influences remain present in the background, the physical act of painting became a way of creating something more immediate, authentic, and heartfelt.

The project originated during the artist’s Fine Art Degree studies with TU Dublin in 2021 through an exploration of coloured paper, structure, and visual impact. Early experiments combining paper, water, and glue produced layered surfaces and organic textures that became the foundation of her process. These investigations gradually evolved into more structured compositions, which she later translated onto canvas, allowing the work to develop into its current form.