Stiúideo SUAN is the studio of Irish contemporary artist Lisa Fitzgerald, whose multidisciplinary practice explores the relationship between art, nature, science and technology.
Based on the Atlantic coast of West Kerry, Lisa draws much of her inspiration directly from the landscape around her. The sea, weathered stone, plant forms, geological textures, shifting light and the traces left by wind and water all find their way into her work.
Her practice moves between mixed-media painting, printmaking, digital processes and objects, combining traditional materials and techniques with contemporary digital methods. Working intuitively, she is interested in what happens when the physical and digital worlds meet — and particularly in how something seemingly intangible can be given a physical, tactile presence.
Material, landscape & the digital
At the heart of Lisa's practice is an ongoing fascination with materialisation and dematerialisation: making the seemingly immaterial nature of the digital world as physical and tangible as possible.
Images may begin with fragments of the natural world — a coastline, a geological formation, a plant, a mark or texture — before being transformed through drawing, painting, scanning and digital manipulation. Layers are built up and taken apart, allowing the work to move between recognition and abstraction.
This process reflects the landscape itself: constantly changing, eroding, accumulating and being transformed.
Lisa's work is particularly concerned with the space between things — between the natural and the technological, the physical and the digital, the observed and the imagined.
The SUAN Project
The SUAN Project developed from an extended engagement with the Atlantic landscape around Cuan Pier, outside Dingle in West Kerry.
Created over a two-month period, the project brought together traditional and digital processes to explore the coastline and its powerful sense of place. The work began with observations and studies of the surrounding environment before being transformed through digital processes and layered image-making.
The project explores ideas of the sublime, landscape and materiality, asking what happens to our experience of an object or landscape when it moves between physical and digital forms.
For Lisa, digital processes are not simply a way of reproducing an artwork. They become another material through which landscape can be experienced, questioned and transformed.
Artist, author & educator
Lisa is a graduate of Crawford College of Art & Design and has worked extensively as an educator in Ireland and France. She holds a PhD in performance history and has maintained an interdisciplinary research practice alongside her visual art.
Her book, Eco-Digital Art: Nature and the New Media Aesthetic, was published by Bloomsbury in 2020. The book examines the development of environmentally sensitive digital art from the late 1960s to the present, reflecting Lisa's longstanding interest in the relationship between technology, art and the natural environment.
Her artwork is held in private and institutional collections, and she has participated in artist residencies and exhibitions in Ireland and internationally.