About / Contact | Emma Brennan Artist

C O N T A C T

B I O G R A P H Y

Emma Brennan is an interdisciplinary artist who works predominantly in performative practices to include multi-media installation, moving image and collaborative processes. Based between Belfast and Dublin she is a former Co-Director and Chairperson at Catalyst Arts Belfast and a current studio member of PS2 Studios Belfast. She was chosen as one of the BBeyond performance collective’s new commissioned artists of 2021 and remains an active member of the collective. She has performed as part of the multiple exhibitions and festivals locally and internationally including the Belfast International Festival of Performance Art (BIFPA), the Live Art Biennial, FIX21, as part of Black Kit Performance Archive in Cologne, Livestock Dublin, Dublin live art festival, on residency at Live Art Ireland and more. In December 2021, Brennan performed in collaboration with singer Meabh Muir to ring in the solstice as part of Array Collective’s Turner Prize winning exhibition The Druithaibs Ball. She is currently working towards publishing a zine of poetry and accompanying visuals based on specific research curated by Ceceilia Graham and facilitating workshops through the year with the MAC and the Rainbow Project that contribute to the second instalment of Sam's Eden, a queer publication and programme of events from Curator, Thomas Wells, to be launched in 2023.

S T A T E M E N T

At the core of my practice is the persistent draw of the material of dough. With the unyielding bond between it and I, my relationship with this material is not just physical, it is also emotional, spiritual and political. The incorporation of dough into my work holds both ancestral and sentimental value. In capturing the processes of this material, in all of it’s alchemic, formal and sensory properties, I explore the complexities of the creation of a living, breathing thing.

My work is currently occupied with the cyclical processes of breathing/living and is formed upon the four pillars of; gestation, birth, life and death. My practice is moving towards a body of work specific to how these pillars relate to the female form. I am thinking about this within the context of Ireland (both currently and historically) and then more intimately where I stand amongst it, not only as artist and creator but also as a queer, Irish, female-identfying, living/breathing being.

I am concerned with finding balance within the contradictions of the transient and the fixed. Through process-based methods I explore the space between the two, where magic and ritual, landscape and the body all fold in on one another. My current research