Brianna Hurley

Brianna Hurley joined KCAT in 2018. She has exhibited work internationally and extensively in Ireland. 

Brianna often works with a combination of acrylic paint, pencil and acrylic marker to depict scenes from the imagined planet of Castalia. Many of her paintings, such as Ocean on Castalia (2020), present lush natural environments with blue flowing rivers and seas, the rich red earth of a hot climate, and beautiful trees frequently coated in with a mass of white buds. There are also numerous stunning white cliff edges as well as various planets and moons in the sky. Castalians, the inhabitants of Castalia, are similar to humans, but larger, with long jet-black hair and fur tipped tails. The life and activities of Castalians are often conveyed as deeply rooted within nature, as when they are shown roaming through a tree covered terrain in The Beauty of Castalia (2021). The artist herself appears in several works, dressed in her customary basketball clothing, as when she is shown running through a forest in She Crossed Rivers and Forest (2021).  

In the painting Brianna Meets Indigenous Leader (2020) the artist is being held in the air by a Castalian leader, at a height where he can look at her face to face. This work in particular indicates that a key purpose underlying Brianna’s work is to raise questions about our ethical relationships with each other, including with those unfamiliar to us, and with the natural world more generally. In this way, her work resonates with indigenous philosophies that are grounded in understandings that we are all one with each other and with the living earth, which must be cherished rather than brutalised to satisfy human greed. Brianna’s work is a call for an ethics of connectivity and respect rather than conflict and exploitation.