Brianna McCarthy is a mixed media artist who lives and works in Trinidad and Tobago. Her work takes on the intricacies and dynamics of representing Afro-Caribbean women who are portrayed as being strong, long-suffering, exoticised and picturesque beings against a backdrop of poverty, hardship, abuse and/or scorn. McCarthy’s constructions and representations revolt against and subvert the stereotypical trends of representing the black body.
Through various media: collage, drawing, illustration, and painting she constructs and manipulates a range of deeply personal and emotional experiences within the constructions. Her work exposes a new range of depth of expressions and emotions, which for the most part, are non-existent in the recorded cultures of the Caribbean landscape.
Working in beauty and repetition, the faces and beings she assembles will add to, and possibly change perceptions and allow for a societal awakening of the ways in which relations and relationships are changing in increasingly small world. McCarthy takes pencil to paper, ink to vellum and knife to cloth, to mend the parts of her experience, to fill in it’s gaps with beauty, questions and expressions of the social and relational.
McCarthy interns with and designs for The Cloth Design Company and will be collaborating with Pop’Africana Magazine (www.popafricana.com) on a future issue. She was recently featured in ARC Magazine (www.arcmagazine.com), a Caribbean visual art and culture publication. Her work is in permanent collections throughout the US, UK and the Caribbean.
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