In Fitzpatrick’s paintings, figurative forms appear enmeshed within complex systems of processes, sounds, memories, and ideas. Bodies morph into musical and mechanical apparatus, while objects become animated or anthropomorphic. In one painting, a human heart is swapped for a glass armonica, an 18th-century instrument with melancholic tones once thought to induce madness. In another, a masked figure plucks at the strings of a suspension bridge, becoming a self-playing Aeolian harp. 

The title A Musical Instrument references a poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in which the pagan god Pan transforms a reed from the riverbed into a panpipe, not knowing the pain caused by ‘Making a poet out of a man’. Music-playing, and by extension, all creative expression, is positioned as something mediumistic, involuntary, and yet also a source of struggle. In Fitzpatrick’s paintings, however, it also appears to foster a kind of connectivity: spines become injected with musical notes; bodies seem to communicate through diagrammatic wave particles; tangled webs of veins, nerves, and arteries imply a porosity of self, a consciousness that expands beyond our physical bodies.