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copyright Brittany Ferns
“Breath” Exhibition
Brittany Ferns
Brittany Ferns
Newcastle, Australia, b. 1988
Brittany Ferns is an Australian painter whose work translates the landscapes and quiet moments of everyday life into imagined worlds built from figure, symbol and storytelling. Born in Sydney to a Uruguayan mother and an Australian father, she grew up between two cultures, two ways of reading belonging. That unresolved duality is not a subject she left behind. It is the engine of her practice.
Originally trained as a textile designer in Los Angeles, Ferns brings a deep sensitivity to material and surface to her painting. She works with thick textured linens, handmade boards, oil paint, wax and rice papers, layering and removing pigments to create tactile, earthy surfaces. Her muted palettes and softly weathered marks produce compositions that feel at once grounded and otherworldly. Imperfections are not corrected. The marks of time are part of the meaning.
Her visual language draws on folk-inspired imagery and symbolic forms that recur across cultures — suns, moons, shells, organic forms and the human figure. But in her hands, these symbols are never decorative. The figure does not stand before the sun: it becomes the sun. The body and the landscape are made of the same matter, their boundaries dissolved through layering and removal of pigment. Time spent in Mexico and Guatemala deepened that relationship, revealing how naturally colour, pattern and symbol can live inside the everyday, inseparable from the history and stories that came before.
For BREATH, Ferns returned to what she calls the simple things — the earth beneath you, the changing moon, the warmth of the sun, the body. The works carry a cosmological scale — ancient and immediate at once. In a world that moves fast and asks for constant attention, the elemental forms that have existed long before us become quiet anchors. Not as decoration, but as points of return.
Motherhood runs through her work as a recurring awareness — of continuity, of what is passed forward, of being part of a story larger than a single life.
Her work is represented by Tappan Collective, Los Angeles; Uprise Art, New York; and Grainger Gallery, Canberra. BREATH marks her debut in Portugal.
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