Fiona O'Hara

My name is Fiona O'Hara and with a name like that you'd be correct in guessing I'm Irish! I approach most things with an artist viewpoint; curiousity, enaction and an attempt at an openmind e.t.c. to everything I do, whether thats working with people, approaching a new piece of research or just making with my hands.

 

I graduated art college (The Dublin Institute of Technology) in 1998, specialising in Painting but I mostly used mixed media; ice sculpture, photography, etching text onto glass etc.

I have worked with adults with an Intellectual disability through art for almost two decades. 

 

I completed a Masters in Art Therapy in Queens (Belfast) in 2007 and was a practicing art therapist part time until 2014 when I returned to college to study a MSc Cognitive Science. My art therapy training re-invigorated my love of working with art materials, how essential making art is to my well-being and a hunger for research. The theorectical training I undertook as part of my art therapy training became the armature for much of work; I began working with imagery that I remembered from dreams or unconscious imagery and symbols that arise in my work, often recurring archetypes over years of art work and dream journalling.

 

I began researching for my project "Creative Evolution" in 2013; I had my genome mapped and read an extensive amount of theories about genetic influences on creativity and found the dispartity among results frustrating. I have been interested in how creativity and art making is influenced by the brain and this time decided to approach my research in a more guided and formal manner. So I returned to university to dedicate some time from each week for two years to studying Cognitive Science. I completed this MSc in 2016 and certainly learned a lot more than I could have researched alone. My next body of work will be using this research as it's armature investigating the cognitive aspects of making art.

I began writing my blog fionaviola.wordpress.com as a motivational process which encourages me to record and review and of course complete art work as well as working in my teaching post. It has been a useful way of archiving and presenting my studio experiments; the books, sites and workshops I have found useful and what materials have worked for me and which haven't.