Ian Fenton: Welcome
Ian Fenton's art practice places cut paper not at the margins, but firmly at the centre of serious artistic enquiry. Working primarily with large-format, hand-painted paper, he uses water-based paints and inks to build layered, tactile compositions. Every tear, cut and brushstroke is made by hand—nothing is digital. This deliberate, physical process embraces the integrity of materials and invites close, attentive looking.
Collage is often seen as a sideline in Western art history, something casual or associated with childhood, amateurism or with the last years of Matisse. But I’m interested in what happens when we start from that place, and push cut paper as a serious, expressive form. For me, it’s not a fallback, it's the heart of the work.
Fenton’s palette is restrained: predominantly shades of blue, punctuated by interruptions of orange. This chromatic discipline is more than aesthetic—it holds emotional intensity and restraint in tension, offering a kind of freedom through limitation.
There’s a balance in what I do between experimentation with materials and a more personal, inward focus. While the compositions are often semi-abstract, they’re shaped by memory, reflection, or a response to literature. Recent works, for instance, draw on The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot, not as illustration, but as emotional and thematic ground. Some pieces are personal tributes, like the veiled figure in Dubhghaill, or Himavant, which speaks to our world’s current anxieties.
Fenton works from his studio in Brighton, he doesn’t set out to make work that is overtly about identity, but his perspective as a queer Irish artist shapes both the context and sensibility of his practice. Themes such as dislocation, reverence, and quiet emotion thread through the work. He is not interested in spectacle, but rather in depth, clarity, and the slow insistence that certain materials—and certain personal experiences—belong at the centre, not the margins.
