Anna Erickson Presents Artist Spotlight : Darcy Brenna

by emilie trice

Oscillating between moments of stillness and unbridled emotion, Darcy Brenna’s abstract works expose dichotomies within the human condition. She captures extreme states of being in gestures that intimate the cyclical stages of existence, wrought in a rich palette of deep reds, violets, corals, and marine blues. Brenna’s compositions erupt and swell, invoking fury and passion, defiance and strength. This surface tension is balanced by underlying traces of brushstrokes, left semi-visible by the artist — a record of becoming that suggests the cumulative effects of life itself. 

Fleshy, bodily forms and contrasting tonalities collide in shapes reminiscent of tempests and turbulent seas, revealing the brutality and beauty inherent to nature and its oppositional forces. Just as the seasons initiate perpetual shifts between violence and tenderness — from the bleak frigidity of winter to the exuberant rebirth of spring — Brenna articulates the messy, poetic struggle that defines the very impulse to survive.

Brenna’s work is objectively visceral, propelled by her own emotional instincts and somatic memory. Her artistic process veers from combative to contemplative and back again, like a pendulum swinging between antipodes. Each painting is thus an act of reconciliation, bringing these binaries into harmony through color, form, and spatial synthesis. Layers upon layers of paint, along with lines of poetry, drawings, and other visual fragments, are applied and then obscured, destroyed or concealed, resulting in a sense of depth achieved only via trial and error, surrender and rejection, triumph and resolution, those variables which, in the aggregate, constitute the complexity of lived experience. 

Born in Surrey, UK, in 1998, Darcy Brenna lives and works in Leeds, UK. She received a First Class BA in Fine Art from the University for the Creative Arts in Canterbury. Darcy was an Artist in Residence at the Tracey Emin Artist Residency for eighteen months in 2023-2024. Her work has been exhibited in London, Margate, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Los Angeles.