Based in Sheffield, Cat Brierley is a multidisciplinary artist creating autobiographical artwork. Themes of power, shame, intimacy, and vulnerability have become key focuses within their practice, alongside the analysis of their own childhood and fragile familial relationships.

At the core of Cat’s practice is an archive of their own childhood drawings, which inspire motif, texture, colour, form, and medium. Naive mark-making, constructed cardboard papier-mâché surfaces, and accessible materials such as acrylic paint, glitter glue, felt tip, gel pen, and stickers imbue the work with the universal language of childhood. This visual language frequently acts as a backdrop to extracts from Cat’s journals, which became heavily integrated into their practice after they cut contact with their mother in 2020. Cat experiments with personal confessions, disclosing and concealing parts of  their history, as a means to prompt viewers to decode, disentangle, and project contradictory truths of their own lives onto the work.