About

Vega Brennan is an artist who works mainly with print. She works in a rural setting, five miles from the Solway estuary and in sight of the Northern Fells. She works on a small scale, thinking about and creating work as objects that can be handled and considered in contexts other than in galleries and on walls.

The multiplicity of prints, their possible configurations and iterations are continually fascinating to her in terms of creating or disrupting value. Multiplicity for her is not monstrous or disturbing but an opportunity to expand what is possible. She is also interested in permanence and fragility and how art can be made sustainably and with minimal damage or ideally, with positive benefit to the environment.

Biography

Vega is Australian by birth and she has a mixed Chinese-Portuguese-Spanish parentage. She has lived in Hong Kong, Italy and the UK. Her first degree was in Art History and Italian, which was followed by an MA in History of Printmaking where she explored Renaissance city maps, German Reformation propaganda and Chinese popular prints. She worked in secondary schools for 16 years, also completing an MA in Fine Art and Education at the University of Northumbria in partnership with the Baltic. In 2009 she founded Art Educators North West, a network for Artist-Educators, working closely with the National Society for Education in Art and Design. In 2015 she helped to set up Cumbria Printmakers, a network of professional artists, organising exhibitions, workshops and events. She is Chair of the Tullie House Community Board.

She runs Linden Print Studio, a small, open-access, safer print studio in Carlisle, providing courses and specialist printmaking facilities. She is a founder-member of Art Crit North Cumbria, set up in 2018.

Exhibitions

March 2022
FERAL NEIGHBOURHOODS, Floresta digital exhibition, online

June 2021
Through the Locking Glass group exhibition, Rheged, Penrith

April 2021
Inspire group exhibition, Carlisle

Dec 2020
Presence group exhibition, Carlisle

Aug 2020
Proseed group exhibition, Carlisle

Nov 2018 – Jan 2019
Printing Nature, solo exhibition, RSPB Geltsdale

July – September 2018
Remembrance, group exhibition, Carlisle Museum of Military Life, Carlisle Castle

Nov 2017- Jan 18
The Secret Garden, Cumbria Printmakers, Theatre by the Lake

2017
A Poetic Vision, Cumbria Printmakers and Cumbria Sculptors and Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere

2015
Cumbria Printmakers inaugural exhibition, Gallery Artemis, Cockermouth

2015
The Reconnect Project, MA final exhibition, Baltic 39