Professional artists in their own right, Mary Kennedy and Michel Woodey began working together under the name of Fiona Hoop in 2000. They were commissioned to create site-specific installations combining painting, photography and interior design.
This successful partnering led to a deeper exploration of collaborative painting, a concept which has its roots in the early Surrealist artists’ technique of passing a piece of work back and forth. Each artist contributes an element in turn, until the chemistry is complete. The individual elements must blend seamlessly and harmoniously, as in a musical orchestration. Fiona Hoop is a pseudonym for an ever-evolving duet exploring abstract, collage and encaustic, landscape, figurative and still-life.
The work is housed in private and public collections in New York, Dallas, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Toronto and Vancouver.