C O N T A C T
Email: emmabrennanartist@gmail.com
Social: www.instagram.com/emma_breadman
B I O G R A P H Y
Emma Brennan (She/Her) is an interdisciplinary artist working predominantly in performative practices including multi-media installation, moving image and collaborative processes. Based in Belfast and originally from Dublin, her practice finds public outcomes in exhibitions and festivals locally, nationally and internationally. Brennan is a current board member of Bbeyond, Belfast and Live Art Ireland, Tipperary. She is also the founder of QRIT Belfast, a queer crit group. Brennan is a former Co-Director of Catalyst Arts Belfast. She is a current member of the 2025/26 cohort for the Freelands Foundation Syllabus programme.
Brennan’s practice engages the multiplicities and nuances of Irish identity through a Queer Feminist lens. From our oral histories and the embedded presence of the grotesque in our mythology, to the current context of a post colonial Ireland under capitalism, Brennan challenges and dissects her position as an artist in relation to these contexts within her work. Recent works include Girls Who Like Beuys (2025) at Ulster Museum, her solo exhibition It Is & I Am (2024) at Belfast Exposed Gallery, MANTLE (2024), Riddles Warehouse with Catalyst Arts.
S T A T E M E N T
For some time now my practice has been occupied with the cyclical processes of gestation, birth, life and death. I have been exploring these four pillars in how they relate to the female form and more intimately where I, as a Queer, Irish, Female Creator am positioned in relation to these concepts. Using the tradition of oral histories from the Island of Ireland I am preoccupied with the presence of the Grotesque within our mythologies and how this can relate to the four pillars outlined above. I am particularly interested in the notions of queerness, trans species and polyamory that populate our oral histories and their expression through the use of visceral imagery, bodily symbolism and exaggerations of scale.
I move through material exploration to reflect on Queerness in art-making, seeking expansion and fluidity, remaining open to multitudes of meanings rather than limiting definitive answers . The aim some of my most recent work has been an exploration and celebration of the grotesque in relation to Queerness and material processes.