AUROS ART

The Golden Serpent Studio

INTRODUCTION

Auros Art — The Golden Serpent Studio is the creative home of M.J. Fountain: painter, writer, and crafter, working at the confluence of myth, literature, and the materiality of light.The studio name is not arbitrary. Auros — gold, radiance, the irreducible — meets the serpent in its oldest form: the Ouroboros, the self-consuming and self-renewing circle that appears across cultures and centuries as the symbol of eternal return, transformation, and the unity of opposites. It is an image from alchemy, from Gnosticism, from the margins of illuminated manuscripts. It is also, quietly, the organising logic of this practice — work that folds back on itself, that is never quite finished becoming.The paintings are built in oil, foiling, gemstone, and light-reflective material. They are layered constructions in which surfaces hold more than they immediately show. The subject matter moves through mythology, fairy tale, and literary narrative — the deep stories that human cultures return to not because they are escapist, but because they are true in the way that only symbolic language can be.This is a studio with a wide reach. Alongside the original paintings and exhibition work, Auros connects to The Art of Fairy Tales, Amazon Handmade art prints and jewellery, paperback and Kindle editions via Amazon KDP and Ingram Spark, and a quarterly Substack — where white papers and longer essays are available to free subscribers. All of it belongs to the same enquiry, expressed in different forms.

The Enchanted Swan

ARTIST

Artist Statement
My practice operates at the intersection of visual art, mythology, and literary tradition. Working primarily in oil paint with integrated mixed media :metallic foiling, gemstones, and light-reflective surfaces; I construct layered paintings in which visibility itself becomes a subject.What a surface conceals and what it releases under changing light is not incidental to the work, it is where the work's central argument is located. Each painting holds abstract and representational form in deliberate tension: neither resolves entirely into the other. That irresolution is structural.In quantum mechanical terms, the painted surface functions analogously to a wave state, a field of latent possibility that does not collapse into fixed meaning until it is observed. The viewer completes the work. Their presence, their movement through the light, their particular moment of looking, is the event that temporarily makes the implicate explicit.What they see is real; it is also contingent. Another viewer, another angle, another quality of light, and something else emerges from the same surface. The painting does not change. The unfolding does.
The subject matter is drawn consistently from myth, fairy tale, and literature: sources that function not as illustration but as symbolic field.These are not stories that require retelling so much as images that require excavation; the latent content that persistent narratives carry across cultures and centuries. The Ouroboros, which gives the studio its name, exemplifies this: an image so old and so widely distributed that it operates less as symbol than as archetype, in the precise Jungian sense.Jung's concept of the collective unconscious, the inherited layer of psychic structure that underlies individual experience and finds expression in recurring mythological motifs, provides the theoretical architecture for this enquiry. The process of individuation, through which the self integrates its unconscious material and moves toward wholeness, is legible in the structure of fairy tale and myth: the descent, the ordeal, the transformation, the return.My paintings engage this structure not illustratively but formally, encoding process and resolution in the material logic of layering, concealment, and the emergence of light.This sits alongside a parallel commitment to David Bohm's implicate order, the proposition that what is visible is always an unfolding of something deeper, temporarily made explicit before returning to the enfolded ground. Between Bohm and Jung, between physics and depth psychology, the practice finds its coordinates: the hidden made momentarily perceptible, the surface as threshold rather than terminus.The work continues to develop across exhibition, academic, and independent contexts, and extends into writing, printmaking, and jewellery — different registers of the same sustained investigation.Media & Exhibition Chronology — M.J. Fountain / AurosBiography
M.J. Fountain is a British painter, maker, and writer whose formal art practice emerged from a deliberate and considered transition — from a career in business to a rigorous academic and studio discipline.
Entering the University of Lincoln in 2021, Fountain completed both a BA (Hons) in Fine Art and a subsequent Master of Arts, building a multimedia oil painting practice anchored in Jungian psychology, quantum consciousness theory, mythological research, and classical folklore narrative.The academic years were productive and purposeful, with exhibition activity concentrated within institutional and public contexts. A small number of early works have entered the secondary market via public auction, primarily in Ireland — the natural first circulation of work from an artist moving from academic study into an independent international practice. Commercial output is now in active development across original painting, fine art prints, jewellery, and publishing.Exhibition History2025 'The Eternal Weave - Natures Dance of Light', MA Fine Art Degree Show
Project Space Plus Gallery, Central Lincoln. August 2025.'The Eternal Weave' is a fully integrated multimedia installation presented as M.J. Fountain's MA Fine Art submission, a unified artwork comprising three large-scale oil paintings, a handcrafted ceramic, silver and gem sculpture, and an original 2.5D animated film with an original musical score composed and recorded by M.J. Fountain, experienced by viewers through 3D glasses.The installation proposes that consciousness is not confined to living systems, that crystals, with their self-organising structures, participate in the same universal patterns of form and energy that move through forests, spider silk, and human minds. The theoretical coordinates are Rupert Sheldrake's morphic resonance and David Bohm's implicate order: the work does not illustrate these frameworks so much as embody them, constructing an environment in which the boundary between observer and observed becomes genuinely permeable.The three oil paintings anchor the physical space, rendering a sycamore leaf, honeysuckle flowers, and foxgloves as abstractions in which cellular and cosmic geometries mirror one another, visual meditations on the fractal logic that connects nature's smallest details to its largest structures. At the installation's centre stands a ceramic tree branch bearing hand-formed resin sycamore leaves, from which a fine silver wire spider's web is suspended.Crystal beads catch and distribute light throughout the web; a small silver spider set with a blue cabochon stone rests at its edge, Arachne, an artist-weaver and metaphor for the delicate and purposeful architecture of natural systems, spun into the mysteries of the Universe.The animated film extends the installation into an immersive dreamlike forest environment. Web droplets become floating crystals; within each, dancers in mirrored costumes reflect and refract coloured light as living prisms. The oil paintings recur across mirrored floral arabesque patterns, spiralling into infinite visual echo — a direct evocation of Sheldrake's morphic fields in motion. The original musical score, composed and recorded by M.J. Fountain, provides the acoustic architecture that holds the installation together across its physical and virtual registers, is simultaneously scientific enquiry and spiritual proposition, an invitation to reconsider the boundaries of consciousness, matter, and interconnection.2024 — NHS Peter Hodgkinson Centre Group Mural; and Oncology Department Solo Mural Commission
Lincoln County Hospital, Greetwell Road, Lincoln.
M.J. Fountain was selected among a cohort of six undergraduate contemporary artists by the University of Lincoln to co-produce a suite of award-nominated public murals and courtyard artworks for the new £25 million Castle and Ellis acute mental health wards at the Peter Hodgkinson Centre, delivered in partnership with Lincolnshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust. The commission produced therapeutic, nature-inspired installations for integral courtyard spaces and the Wellness Café — large-scale landscape works engineered to speak to one another across clinical environments, anchoring patients within the expansive geography of Lincolnshire.This collaborative commission resulted in a further individual invitation: a solo mural of Lincoln Cathedral, permanently installed in the hospital's Oncology Department.2023 — 'Demo Valley' — Solo Presentation within Group Exhibition
Project Space Plus Gallery, Central Lincoln. BA Fine Art Degree Show.
Featured work: Freya's Necklace — a monumental multimedia oil on canvas, 12' x 8', incorporating embedded silver foil, aquamarine, glass shards, fired solid silver, and silver flake. The work was oriented in portrait format on its side, presenting the abstract, fragmented contours of a golden necklace integrated into a conceptual landscape. A fired silver swallow pendant and custom beaded gem necklace accompanied the painting as a unified artwork. The piece connects with themes of quantum consciousness, fractured mythologies, and the viewer's active participation in creating meaning through their engagement with the artwork.2023 — International Postcard Show — Selected Exhibitor
Surface Gallery, Nottingham.
A gold-foiled and oil pastel work depicting two boxing hares beneath a heavy golden sun. Selected for this open-call commercial showcase; the work was acquired by a private collector on the secondary contemporary market.2022 — 'Through the Looking Glass' — Collaborative Group Exhibition
The Blue Room, The Lawn, Lincoln, LN1 3BU.
A site-specific multi-artist installation responding to the architectural and psychological legacy of The Lawn as a nineteenth-century asylum. M.J. Fountain contributed a ceiling-suspended mixed media installation fusing kiln-fired glass with metallic foils, acrylics, and embedded gemstones, incorporating optical floating glass eye elements. Conceived as a visual manifestation of suspended presence, the work investigated the elasticity of time as a function of quantum consciousness, informed by localised historical research and the site's own layered histories.2022 — Solo Exhibition
LORIC, Bishop Grosseteste University, Lincoln.
An individual showcase presenting a cohesive body of work tracing classical folklore motifs across contemporary experimental mediums.2021–2023 — Selected Studio Group Showcases
Peter de Wint Building, University of Lincoln.

The Enchanted Swan

MEDIA

Press Pack — M.J. Fountain / Auros: The Golden Serpent StudioShort Biography
100 words — for programme notes, listings, and event materials
M.J. Fountain is a British mixed media painter and writer working at the intersection of myth, literary tradition, and the philosophy of consciousness. Painting under the studio name Auros, The Golden Serpent Studio.Fountain constructs layered works in oil, metallic foiling, and gemstone that engage the viewer as an active participant in the production of meaning. Subject matter is drawn from fairy tale, mythology, and canonical literature. The practice is informed by Jungian depth psychology and the theoretical physics of David Bohm. Fountain is also published under the same name across fiction, illustrated volumes, and critical essays.Extended Biography
280 words — for feature interviews, gallery consignment packs, and catalogue use
M.J. Fountain is a British painter, writer, and independent researcher whose practice spans fine art, literary fiction, and critical theory. Working from Auros: The Golden Serpent Studio, Fountain produces mixed media paintings in oil, metallic foiling, and light-reflective gemstone surfaces, layered constructions in which visibility itself is the subject.The studio name encodes the practice's central logic. Auros, gold, radiance, the irreducible, meets the Ouroboros, the ancient self-consuming and self-renewing serpent that recurs across alchemical, Gnostic, and mythological traditions as the symbol of eternal transformation and the unity of opposites. It is an image that operates less as symbol than as archetype, in the precise Jungian sense: inherited, distributed across cultures, and resistant to exhaustion.Fountain's paintings hold abstract and representational form in deliberate tension. In quantum mechanical terms, the painted surface functions analogously to a wave state, a field of latent possibility that does not collapse into fixed meaning until observed.The viewer completes the work. Movement through the light, the particular moment of looking, the quality of attention brought, these are the events that temporarily make the latent explicit. The work draws on David Bohm's concept of the implicate order and Carl Jung's theory of individuation and the collective unconscious as its twin theoretical coordinates.Subject matter moves consistently through fairy tale, mythology, and canonical literature, not as illustration but as symbolic excavation of what persistent narratives carry beneath their surface.Fountain's wider practice extends to literary fiction, art prints, illustrated volumes, and critical essays, published and distributed under the same name across multiple platforms. Postgraduate research is in active development.Critical Note
For catalogue essays, review contexts, and curatorial introductions
The paintings of M.J. Fountain ask something unusual of a viewer: not interpretation, but participation. Built from oil, foiling, and gemstone in accumulative layers, the surfaces hold more than they show, releasing different content under different conditions of light, movement, and attention. This is not optical illusion but ontological proposition: that the visible is always contingent, always an unfolding of something that remains, in Bohm's term, enfolded. Fountain works at the point where theoretical physics meets Jungian depth psychology, where the wave structure of quantum consciousness meets the archetype, where the fairy tale's ancient grammar meets the materiality of gold and stone. The result is work that does not resolve. It returns you, changed, to the looking.Boilerplate
Standard closing paragraph, appended to all press releases
M.J. Fountain is the painter and writer behind Auros: The Golden Serpent Studio. Original paintings, art prints, and illustrated volumes are available via Auros Art Hub on Amazon KDP and Amazon Handmade. Literary fiction and independent book distributions are available via M.J. Fountain Author Profile on IngramSpark. Studio essays and critical writing are published quarterly via Auros Art on Substack. For feature interviews, panel bookings, gallery consignment enquiries, or image asset permissions, please use the secure contact form at https://www.auros.com

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