-
- Fiona Nolan
Fiona
Nolan
Gloss Over
Fiona Nolan is a visual artist from Co. Clare working primarily in painting, using oil on canvas to explore the psychological and emotional weight of contemporary beauty standards. Her practice is grounded in personal experience, engaging directly with the effects these ideals have on mental health, self-perception, and the female body.
She uses her own body as both subject and symbol, using the painted figure as a site of vulnerability, resistance, and reclamation. She unpacks the tension between internal experience and external expectation through carefully constructed compositions, interrogating how identity is shaped and fractured under the pressure to conform.
A recurring theme in her work is the painted texture of plastic, wrapping, clinging, or distorting the body. This is a symbol for the synthetic and often invisible ways in which societal ideals embed themselves beneath the skin. Unlike references to plastic surgery or cosmetic enhancement, these depictions speak to a quieter, more subtle internalisation.
By rendering plastic as a painted surface rather than a material substance, she reimagines its presence in the body, less about transformation, more about suffocation, entrapment, and fragility.