NEWS

March 02024

February 02024

I was added to the Vice Chancellor’s list at RMIT for 2023 and I’m super proud of it!

November 02023

I am honoured to be a finalist in the 2023 Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize at Bendigo Art Gallery. It is a thrill to see my work Pulling together. Falling apart. on the walls with so many extraordinary painters. Congratulations to the winner Tuppy Ngintja Goodwin, an absolutely exquisite painting Antara.
There is a People’s Choice Award in which you can vote for your favourite piece in the exhibition (perhaps mine? ;)) Link below;
https://www.bendigoregion.com.au/bendigo-art-gallery/mairin-briody-arthur-guy-memorial-painting-prize-finalist

Artist Statement:
I am interested in the experiential capacity of a painting. For a while now, I've been caught on the question; what is a painting in a world falling apart? We are hurtling toward calamity and yet we still need to get up every morning, make school lunches, go to work. It feels as if everything is in tension, and I can't bear to pull a canvas taught across a stretcher bar again. My body, like all bodies, is marinating in the tangle of this uncertain time. I want to fold, fall. To gather myself up. Let myself go.

April 02023

New work.

April 02023

New work. Photographed on Narungga Country.
Wearing the painting. It;s heavy.

March 02023

Solo Exhibition at Five Walls Gallery, Footscray VIC
15 Mar - 1 Apr 2023

December 02022

RMIT 2022 Graduate Exhibition: 6-11 December 2022, RMIT City Campus

Recipient of the Mary Oliphant Prize for Best and Most Ambitious Tutorial Presentation in MFA 2022

I presented an iteration of The Resonance of a Tangle for this exhibition. The space I had been assigned to install/paint within was a landing in the stairwell of Building 4, Bowen Street. The building itself is a grand, Tudor Gothic style structure built in 1890 - this space has commanding stained glass windows that face South, providing a soft but constant light throughout the day. Finding a way to work with the windows (it would have been ludicrous to try to compete) proved to be a challenge, but clarity came when I recognised this was a space of accumulation; a gentle breeze travels up the stairs and circles in the landing space, consequently dust bunnies accumulate along the edges and in the corners, Building 4 has always been a place of learning, generations of students have climbed these stairs - I began to feel the accumulation of ideas and ambitions that have travelled with those students, with the breeze, with the dust.

The Resonance of a Tangle is a collaboration between myself and the painting, and in Building 4 we had to extend our collaboration to include the space. Accumulation is the thread that ties us together; I am an accumulation of my experiences and those I carry within my DNA, the painting is an accumulation of activity, material and interaction. The iteration of the project that resulted in Building 4 was a temporary store of this moment where our - myself, the painting and the space - our separate accumulations converged.

Also, I won an award. Which was a lovely surprise for which I am extremely grateful.

November 02022

The Resonance of a Tangle: Exam Presentation for Masters of Fine Art at RMIT Melbourne

October 02022

Final Masters Project: The Resonance of a Tangle 02022, Dye on canvas, 350 x 300 x 200cm

This project is the culmination of two years research and development conducted through my Masters of Fine Art at RMIT in Naarm (Melbourne). The Resonance of a Tangle is drawn from the work of German art theorist and critic Isabelle Graw exploring an expanded notion of painting and its potential for agency. I’ve used material experimentation and improvisation to give agency to my body narrative and in doing so, seek to imbue my paintings with a vitality of their own. The Resonance of a Tangle is an evolving painting project, reforming and reconfiguring through each iteration.

August 02022

MFA Project 7: Resist. Restrain. Dye on canvas, 350 x 350 x 350cm

May 02022

MFA Project 6: How to Make Rope video 03:20
https://vimeo.com/712742576

This is a video I made in 2022 in an attempt to acknowledge my place in the history of the colonisation of so called 'Australia'. In it I am making rope from that is suspended from the ceiling behind me. Rope is the family name passed down from my ancestors who arrived on the invading first fleet in 1788, the sound in the background is me reciting excerpts from the diaries of Lt. Ralph Clark that refer directly to my ancestor Elizabeth Pulley who was transported on the convict ship 'Friendship'. After they landed, Elizabeth married another convict, Anthony Rope and the couple were 'granted' one of the first parcels of stolen land in 1790 at The Ponds and instructed to 'clear' it - beginning the process of colonisation that continues today

March 02022

MFA Project 5: Pulling together. Falling apart. (both can be true), Acrylic and dye on canvas, 300 x 300 x 300cm

December 02021

Wishing Well - Creative Victoria, Learning Partnership Grant with Mount Pleasant Primary School
Acrylic on concrete, 44m2

November 02021

Recent commissions

August 02021

MFA Project 4: Drench, Acrylic on canvas, 270 x 250cm

May 02021

MFA Project 3: The immense entanglement of everything, Acrylic on canvas, 250 x 50 x 50cm

May 02021

MFA Project 2: Despite the change of its look, it still remains true to itself, Acrylic on canvas, 110 x 65 x 10cm

“an art is emancipated and emancipating when … it stops wanting to emancipate us” - Jacques Ranciere (quoted in On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint by Maggie Nelson, 02021)

April 02021

MFA Project 1: The Tree Series

March 02021

Commuting to Naarm (Melbourne) to begin Masters of Fine Art, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology

“To make a new world, you start with an old one, certainly. To ‘find’ a world, maybe you have to have lost one. Maybe ‘you’ have to be lost. The dance of renewal – the dance that made the world – was always danced here at the edge of things, on the brink … on the foggy coast.” – Ursula K. Le Guin 1989

November 02020

A lovely conversation with Art Gallery of Ballarat curator Julie McLaren

August 02020

Solo Exhibition: Signal 1 August - 27 September 02020 at The Art Gallery of Ballarat, Backspace Gallery

October 02019

Solo Exhibition: Electric Prisms 17-27 October 02019 at TooT Artspace, St Kilda
Opening: Saturday 19 October, 4-6pm

 May 02019

I had a wonderful conversation with Maxine Bazeley when she interviewed me for the Climactic Podcast: Expressing Climate Hope Through Art.

Listen to the episode here.

April 02019

I had the opportunity to chat with the good people from the Australian Wind Alliance about all things wind farmy, sustainability and optimism.