Izzie Beirne

Izzie Beirne (b. 1996, Newcastle upon Tyne) lives and works in London. She took a BA in Fine Art at Leeds Arts University in 2019 and an MFA at Goldsmiths in 2023, where she won the Almacantar Award and studio residency, and has since been shortlisted for the Robert Walters Prize, the Acme Award and the Mosaic Award.

Her work deals with sexual violence and trauma, with recovery, and with a reclamation of pleasure. The process starts with film: she makes videos, or works from existing ones, in which fruit and cream are crushed and pulled apart by hands, the food standing in for the body and the hands for the perpetrator. From those films she takes stills and paints them, blurred and unevenly focused, so that each canvas reads through a lens, cropped like cinema, with the frenzied hands still there above the scene. Recent work draws on Peter Greenaway's The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. Alongside the paintings she makes ceramics, worms, maggots and plates of fruit and cream, which hold the discomfort the paintings keep at a distance.

Exhibitions include By the Ruins Often I Pass at Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery (2026), and shows with Guts Gallery, The Second Act, Twilight Contemporary, OHSH Projects and Unit London in London, and Moosey in Norwich.

In 2024 Plan X presented Visceral in Milan, her first solo exhibition in Italy.