France-Lise McGurn: Never-ending Art

Her paintings and drawings are mostly installations made directly onto the surfaces of the exhibition spaces. The flowing drawings in colourful and delicate lines are inspired by the experience of busy city life and the people within it. Her artwork creates a sense of movement, capturing the range of emotions of human interaction in a city environment.

France-Lise creates beautifully illustrated city highs and lows in her figurative characters, from the nightclub euphoria to the loneliness despite overcrowding.

France-Lise’s figurative artwork is immediately immersive, encouraging the viewer into a creative world of ethereal figures. Her work process is spontaneous and fast-paced, preferring to let her hand create a fictitious world on the walls than to meticulously plan her art.

Having had artistic residencies in HospitalField in Arbroath and Tate St Ives, France-Lise found her artistic style by transforming unusual spaces into artwork, where no surface is spared from paint. Using this drawing room (above) and the St Ives staircase (below), France-Lise adorned all surfaces with playful characters, overlapping and creating layers of bodies, tangled and intertwined for the viewer to create their own story from.

I find my influences in popular culture, I am much more likely to be influenced by something I see on TV or a poster or T shirt.

For her recent exhibition at the Simon Lee Gallery in London, France-Lise created an installation under the title “Percussia”.

Deriving from the word percussion, France-Lise created her continuous artwork to free-flow, as if the art has a beat within it.
For “Percussia”, she draws inspiration from mixing femininity and celebrating female forms with a sense of power and strength. We love her approach to illustrating women, showing them as being both beautiful and strong.
Her art is never far away from pop culture references, citing references like Sleepless in Seattle or the Glasgow club scene as inspirations, so it’s no surprise her exhibition is loosely based on femininity in the modern world.
Her first 2020 exhibition, currently on display at the Tramway in Glasgow, ”Emotia”, transforms her work from sprawling imaginative art into a 3D immersive installation.
France-Lise has translated the fluid lines of her paintings into sculptural forms in neon. A series of new mobile sculptures shimmer and move in the space, complimenting the movement in her artworks.

Emotia is on until 29th March so there’s still time to see it (or follow Tramway on Instagram to have a peek).

We feel like we’re taking a step into France-Lise’s imagination when we look at her artwork, like we’ve been caught up in her day-dreaming. We are in love with pastel colours she uses and the seemingly endless artworks. The beautiful movement and her delicate approach to installation art is unlike anything we’ve seen before: full of life and energy.

We could stare at her installations all day!

***All images are a curated selection from France-Lise’s Instagram, Tramway or Tate’s website: