Fionnuala Hart Gerrity
Fine Art and Craft
I'm Fionnuala Hart Gerrity, a Boston-based figurative artist. I trained in printmaking at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and in hand bookbinding at the North Bennet Street School. My early focus was in relief printing and artist's books. More recently I have returned to an early love, ceramics, to create a body of work exploring the relationships between plants, fungi, and animals.
I work in a wide range of media, including painting, printmaking, ceramics, bookbinding, and embroidery. I strive for a high degree of accuracy to life across all media, playing with color and texture so that thread is transmuted into the scales on a butterfly wing, and clay transforms into bark or fungi. I hope that by seeing and interacting with my work, people will be inspired to notice to the natural world around them, and to find their own treasures there.
For many years I worked in book conservation and preservation, where I was inspired by illustrated books of natural history and the history of science. I draw on the work of female scientists, scientific illustrators, and artists such as Maria Sybilla Merian, Mary Delaney, and Beatrix Potter. I'm interested in the intertwined histories of art and science, and hope to join these two disciplines together in her work.
My artist's books can be found at the Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library and the University of Denver Main Library Special Collections as well as in private collections. I regularly exhibit at the North Bennet Street School's Annual Celebration of Craft, and I co-curated a 2014 exhibit, Reflections on Bindings: Using New Imaging Technology to Study Historical Bindings, at the Yale Law School's Lillian Goldman Law Library. You can view an online version of the exhibit here.
Education
2009-2011
Diploma in Bookbinding
North Bennet Street School
2005-2009
BFA in Printmaking
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts
Awards
2009
American Color Print Society Award, PAFA
2008
James L. Sentz Book Award, PAFA
2007
Color Woodcut Purchase Prize, PAFA
Exhibitions
Group (selected)
2020
March/April Local Artists Show, Dick Blick Central Square, Cambridge, MA
2019
Annual Celebration of Craft, North Bennet Street School, Boston, MA
2019
Bound Together: An Exhibit of Bindings by the North Bennet Street School Community, Boston, MA
2018
Annual Celebration of Craft, North Bennet Street School, Boston, MA
2018
Designer Bookbindings Show and Sale, The Abbey Studio, Marblehead, MA