Fiona Martin
Artist, Storyteller & Digital Archivist
About My Practice
I am a multidisciplinary artist and cultural practitioner based in Luton, working across painting, installation, photography, video and digital media. My practice explores memory, storytelling and participation, focusing on how individuals and communities shape and share cultural memory through lived experience.
Much of my work sits at the intersection of art, research and community collaboration. I am interested in archives not as fixed historical records, but as living, evolving spaces shaped by migration, identity and collective experience. I work with communities to create artworks, stories and digital archives that foreground voices often absent from traditional heritage narratives.
My projects frequently draw on oral histories, personal narratives and shared creative activity, creating spaces where participants become co-authors rather than subjects. I am particularly interested in how creativity can support connection, wellbeing and belonging, and how storytelling can challenge stereotypes while celebrating the complexity of cultural identity.
Alongside my artistic practice, I develop socially engaged projects that experiment with new forms of digital and immersive storytelling, exploring how archives can be preserved, experienced and reimagined through contemporary technologies. My work aims to position art as a tool for dialogue and exchange — connecting past, present and future through collective acts of remembering.
Imagine - 2018
Imagine was a deeply personal collaborative exhibition my sister and I created in memory of our father, Francis Martin, a Luton-based artist and skilled welder. The work explored grief, memory, and legacy through the transformation of his personal belongings—denim, workwear, tools, and clothing—into sculptural and mixed-media artworks. Each piece reimagined fragments of his life and creativity, merging our memories with his materials and art. Through this process, we celebrated his craftsmanship and spirit, turning loss into an act of love and creative continuity—a lasting dialogue between father and daughters, art and remembrance.
Fran Martin - Our Legend
Following my father’s passing, I created an this audiovisual work that wove together fragments of our family’s shared history. The piece incorporated a family interview I recorded in 2005 as part of my BA Fine Art installation on memory and nostalgia. I also digitised an old cassette tape of my father singing his favourite song, Imagine, recorded during a karaoke night in the early 1990s. As both time and the tape itself began to deteriorate, preserving his voice became profoundly important.
The final work paired this fragile recording with a simple showreel of family photographs, creating a deeply personal meditation on love, loss, and legacy. Though the video’s quality reflects the limitations of ageing technology, its emotional truth endures. For our family, it has become an invaluable digital keepsake—a lasting echo of my father’s creativity and spirit.
This experience marked a turning point in my artistic practice, deepening my commitment to storytelling as both remembrance and renewal—a way to preserve not only memory, but the living presence of those we have loved.
The Creative Archivist - 2016-2021
I collated and digitalised Luton Irish Forum’s oral history project Catching the Boat and 25 years of Luton’s St Patrick’s Festival which lead to me curating and building the organisations online archive, a document of the social history of Irish in Luton.
Luton St Patrick’s Festival
St Brigid’s Day
In collaboration with the Luton Irish Forum, I developed the annual St Brigid’s Day celebration, an event dedicated to honouring and celebrating Irish women in Luton. Through storytelling, the project shared the lives and experiences of local women, connecting their stories to wider historical and cultural contexts. Each year’s celebration was accompanied by a beautifully designed community booklet, capturing their words and images as a living memorial. The project became a heart-warming, community-led initiative that built confidence, encouraged self-expression, and celebrated women’s voices. By bringing generations together to share stories, St Brigid’s Day strengthened family ties and community bonds, creating a lasting record of resilience, heritage, and belonging. In 2026 the event celebrated its 10th anniversary demonstrating the power of community-led, social-heritage activities.
Commissioned Portraits & Installations - 2003-Present
My commissioned portrait and installation work explores memory and memorial through visual narrative—creating painted and multimedia portraits that honour personal and cultural legacies. Through installations that combine image, sound, and story, I transform remembrance into creative presence. The majority of my commissioned portraits are for working-class people who do not normally engage in the arts, but feel having a loved one immortalised in oil paint as a status of honour and lasting memorial.
Recent and Ongoing Work
More Blacks, More Dogs, More Irish, More Luton- 2022-Present
More Blacks, More Dogs, More Irish, More Luton is an evolving digital social archive celebrating the cultural diversity and shared histories of Luton. Originally developed with the Luton Irish Forum, supported by the Luton Citizens Fund, the project brings together oral histories, photographs and film to create a living record of the town’s identity, shaped by the voices and lived experiences of its communities.
Development of the website is currently paused while I undertake a period of research supported by Arts Council England through the Develop Your Creative Practice programme. This research explores new approaches to community-led archiving, investigating how digital and immersive technologies can bring archives to life through interactive exhibitions, participatory storytelling and accessible online platforms. The work focuses on ethical and collaborative ways of preserving cultural memory, while exploring how archives can be experienced as active, shared spaces rather than static collections.
This research phase will inform the next stage of More Luton, ensuring the project develops sustainably and responds to new creative possibilities. While public updates are currently quieter, the archive remains an active and evolving practice, with new projects, collaborations and public outcomes expected to emerge from late 2026.
Luton At Heart - 2026-Present
Luton At Heart is a participatory creative wellbeing project exploring how creativity, storytelling and shared experience can support recovery, confidence and connection following serious health challenges, including heart attacks. The project is developed in collaboration with my sister, a local artist, marking a return to working together in response to our shared experience of her heart attack in 2022 and the creative role that art played throughout her recovery journey.
Led by our lived experience and communtiy friendships, the project brings participants together through relaxed visual art and storytelling workshops where personal journeys can be reflected on in a supportive and uplifting environment. Supported by the Luton Creates Fund, and delivered in partnership with Total Wellbeing Luton and The Culture Trust Luton, the project centres creativity as a space for care and collective reflection.
Through drawing, conversation and creative exploration, participants who have also experienced serious health issues, are invited to share memories, emotions and moments of transformation that are often absent from medical or public narratives. No artistic experience is required; the emphasis is on connection, expression and rediscovering confidence through making and sharing.
Luton At Heart also forms part of a wider approach to social archiving within my practice. The stories, reflections and creative outputs generated through the project contribute to a growing community archive that values lived experience as cultural knowledge. Selected outcomes will be featured within the More Luton digital social archive, ensuring participants’ voices form a lasting record of care, resilience and community connection within the town’s evolving cultural memory.
By linking wellbeing, creativity and archive-making, Luton At Heart aims to create both immediate social impact and a long-term legacy — preserving personal stories that might otherwise remain unseen, while contributing to a broader understanding of health, recovery and belonging in Luton.
Total Wellbeing Luton’s Cardiac Recovery Group 2026