Moving & Growing

It’s nearly 4 years since Fiona Chen left GMD. She now works at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, so we were interested to know more about that and also get her reflections on her own creative practice since college.

I graduated from GMD at LCC in 2022. Looking back, it was three intense and genuinely joyful years that shaped how I think as a maker. Not only learning how to design, but Why design matters, and how research can give creative decisions real weight.

I’m currently working at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew as a Digitisation Officer on the Herbarium digitisation programme. Day to day, I help digitise, catalogue, and organise metadata for plant and fungal specimens – part of a large-scale effort to build a comprehensive digital catalogue and make internationally significant collections accessible online for researchers and the public worldwide. Alongside this, I continue to work as a freelance graphic designer, creating visual identities, motion graphics, and short animations.

My core interest is using tangible, carefully crafted forms like images, movement, materials, rhythm – to communicate emotions and the facts behind them. Studying GMD sparked my curiosity for moving image, which led me to further specialise in animation at Central Saint Martins. Since then, my approach has become more process-led: I’m drawn to hand-drawing, model-making, and post-production as thinking tools, not just production steps. Much of my work explores how emotions take root both personally and socially and what issues often sits underneath them. For now, I have a clearer understanding of the kind of art I want to create, which is my personal emotional perusal. But what I find more practical, or rather, the useful skills and techniques I value, lie in the process of making art, it is the creative process I truly enjoy. This is precisely why I lean toward being a process-oriented creator rather than a director. Digitising is similar to design making, we research, plan and we put our hands on to do it.”

Advice for current students?

If I could offer one piece of advice to current GMD students: stay close to the “engine” of your work. Skills and software evolve quickly, but clarity of intention and the courage to keep making will carry you much further”.

There seems to be an overall growing/organic theme to both your job and your personal work?

To illustrate the growing process, particularly from GMD till now, there is a good example using my charcoal drawing techniques,
from GMD: https://vimeo.com/773119342
and more recently: https://vimeo.com/923207063”

Personal portfolio: fionachenart.com
Instagram: @fionachenart