dialogue
April Lannigan | Artist
August 2025
5 min read
April Lannigan’s practice is deeply shaped by her movement between rural Scotland and the post-industrial city of Glasgow. Growing up between Glasgow and Edinburgh, her creative journey began with an interest in found relics, discarded industrial objects scattered across the fields near her hometown. These sites, act as “libraries of cultural shifts,” revealing layers of human interaction with environment and identity. Now based at SWG3, along the River Clyde, she continues to absorb textures and colours from everyday encounters, flattened road signs, reused coffee cups, or weathered industrial sheds, translating them into her work.
Drawn to abstraction through its capacity to communicate what often goes unnoticed, Lannigan works across painting, sculpture, and environmental installation. Colour and materiality are her guiding forces, enabling her to transform both the micro details of her surroundings and the monumental scale of industrial landscapes into artistic expression. In painting, she approaches the canvas as an unfolding process rather than a fixed plan, comparing it to reading a book where each chapter reveals new possibilities. Her preference for large, raw cotton canvases, heavier than her own body, reflects her interest in scale, environment, and the transience of information.
Lannigan’s influences range from icons such as Jessica Stockholder and Katharina Grosse, whose recent Art Basel installation she describes as one of the boldest artistic declarations of recent years, to London-based painters like Catherine Long, Jadé Fadojutimi, Katherine Qiyu Su, and Pam Evelyn, whose explorations of painting and materiality inspire her. With aspirations to spend more time in London, she seeks to connect with its vibrant contemporary painting scene and expand the reach of her practice.
April Lannigan. Photo courtesy of the Artist.
How has growing up between Glasgow and Edinburgh shaped your practice?
“Living between two big cities in Scotland and the changing environment as I commute from rural space into the Post-Industrial city of Glasgow, has had huge impact on my creative practice. My route into painting, came through an interest in found relics- objects abandoned in landscape from former heavy industry sprawled across the fields surrounding my hometown. Such waste sites, often dwelling, some reused are key points of creative exploration, they are very telling about our engagement as humans with environment and with other people. Libraries of cultural shifts in identity. These sites are more frequent on approach to Glasgow, SWG3, where I currently have a studio, sits alongside the river Clyde, with artists occupying many old buildings, transforming them into creative spaces.
I am collecting colour and surface through fashion, materials & photographs. The bold yellow luminescent road sign, flattened on a sea of grey tarmac by passing cars. Coffee cups, which are reused into oil mixing tubs, passing the outer city to reach the studio, where industrial sheds are missing roofing panels.”
April Lannigan, Breathing, Oil on raw Canvas, 180cm x 120cm x 5cm, 2025.
What draws you to abstraction as a visual language?
“Colour & materiality draws me towards abstraction as my primary mode of visual language. A method of understanding often overlooked or quieter moments from the environment that surrounds me, from the micro to the monumental, translating this into painting. I fluctuate between making sculpture, environmental art and oil painting, yet rarely move out of these three lanes. Each artwork is an attempt to grapple with or give voice to something distinctly different from me, yet of which, I find myself entangled with.”
April Lannigan in her studio, in front of painting 'Paused'. Photography courtesy of the Artist.
Do you approach the canvas with a clear plan, or do materials and marks lead the way as you work?
“When I am painting, it is very much as though I am reading a really good book, with lots of chapters. I only started oil painting one year ago and have been generating work at a vast momentum ever since, each painting a continuation of the last. The surface of my paintings as an object is extremely important to me, thick unprimed, raw duck cotton canvas, 5cm deep. It is a weighted object, to a scale grander than my body, speaking more to environment and transience of information. The work unfolds through exploration in the studio, not through a planned execution.”
April Lannigan, Paused, Oil on raw Canvas, 180cm x 120cm x 5cm, 2025.
Your installation Marked Paper, 2025 at Hidden Door Festival responded directly to the site.
How did working in that specific space shape your approach and did it open up anything new in your thinking or movement compared to the studio?
“Marked Paper, my most recent Installation work, at The Paper Factory in Edinburgh was an extremely direct conversation with the post-industrial landscape. Marking out a permeable space using the medium of paint, which unlike the bound surface, could be experienced and encompassed spatially.
My approach to colour and material was highly impulsive in comparison to oil paintings which can get quite labored over. The spontaneity of site specificity and raw intervention is some thinking to take away, as someone who has a tendency to overwork a painting. Reminding myself the allowance to leave breathing space, allow duration to become methodology, this builds up and collapse of information on the surface.“
April Lannigan’s studio. Photography courtesy of the Artist.
Have your influences remained steady over time, or have they changed as your work has evolved?
“Jessica Stockholder & Katharina Grosse are two of my all-time art icons- Both making waves in artistic understanding of material & environment within varying contexts. Grosse's recent Installation work at Art Basel 2025, was one of the rawest & unfiltered, declarations of creative practice in the past 5 years.
London has so many talented painters based there at present, emerging artists who catch my eye Catherine Long, Jade Fadojutimi, Katherine Qiyu Su & Pam Evelyn. Each pushing at the boundary of contemporary painting & its materialisms. I would love to spend more time exploring London & making connections to showcase my art there!”
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