Kitty O’Brien
Painting (Ba)
Edinburgh College of Art
Graduates: 2026
Specialisms: Painting / Fine Art
My location: Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Kitty O’Brien
First Name: Kitty
Last Name: O’Brien
University / College: Edinburgh College of Art
Course / Program: Painting (Ba)
Graduates: 2026
Specialisms: Painting / Fine Art
My Location: Edinburgh, United Kingdom
About
Kitty O’Brien, born in Birmingham, England in 2003, is an emerging artist whose practice centres on painting and textile surfaces. Working with translucent washes of acrylic, ink, and water on unstretched fabric, she develops atmospheric scenes that blur together references from film, fashion imagery, theatre, and memory. Her work explores femininity as something constructed and continually negotiated, creating dream-like environments where figures appear suspended between performance and introspection. Through staining and unstable spatial settings, O'Brien's paintings examine how identity can be shaped as much by image culture and spectatorship as by lived experience.
Apple Skins consists of a series of paintings on unstretched fabric using diluted acrylic and ink. Through pouring, layering, wiping, and staining, I allow controlled gestures to meet bleeding and absorption, producing unstable, theatrical spaces shaped by contemporary culture, social expectations, and memory. Within these spaces, my figures occupy the threshold between private experience and public display. At the centre of my work is femininity as a performed and revisable identity. I examine how agency and vulnerability coexist when the self is shaped by both personal desire and external expectation. Through unpredictable surfaces and staged compositions, I explore identity as fluid and continually negotiated, suspended between intimacy and spectacle, control and surrender.
Competitions
