Chris J Farrell is a Glasgow-born and -based artist. He studied BA Painting at Gray's School of Art, graduating in 2018, where he received a runner-up prize for the BP Fine Art Award. After his undergraduate studies, he received a mentorship bursary from the New Art School (NAS) in 2022 and subsequently joined Glasgow School of Art's MFA programme, graduating in 2024. He has exhibited both locally and internationally, including an MFA exchange show at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg (HFBK), curated by Martin Boyce and Graham Ramsay. In 2025, he was shortlisted for the Freelands Foundation Fellowship at the Belfast School of Art (Ulster University) and recently had his first DIY solo show, 'Swedger Island', at Glasgow's StrangeField.

Farrell's practice uses painting, drawing, film, and installation to examine contemporary Scotland as a digitally embedded, hallucinatory folk memory. Through the friction between traditional mediums of oil paint, charcoal and contemporary processes of airbrushing, digital collage and filmic installation, he weaves threads through binaries of the sacred and profane, of the pictorial and textual, of the poetical and mundane, to create a visual realm for opposing forces to coalesce and fracture — in dialogue with the alleged schizophrenic splitting of the Scottish psyche under the theory of Caledonian Antisyzygy.

By scavenging online media – YouTube rips, phone footage, and game textures – he rebuilds scenes from lived and imagined experience, staging them through recurring fictional figures, including Dr Euan Onyett and his vanished student Rory Byrne. His practice sits between confession and invention: autobiographical material is performed, altered, and reimagined to highlight the unreliability of personal and collective memory.

Farrell's recent project, Swedger Island, contains the unravelling narrative of an imagined Scottish music festival and a questionable narrator's account of it, anchoring his autofiction in an exhibition setting. A looping film shown in a gazebo, paintings, monumental drawings, and ephemeral festival sculptures together render a collective Scottish hauntology as a multidisciplinary, self-examining pseudo-mythology.