Charlotte Brisland
About the Create! Magazine 10th Anniversary Book: Create! Magazine is honored to celebrate a decade of contemporary art by publishing a look back at previously selected artists: their achievements, career growth, and more since being published. Stay tuned for the book launch in fall 2026, and join our newsletter to stay up to date.
Charlotte Brisland, featured in both Create! Magazine and the Create! Magazine 10th Anniversary Book, is a British painter living and working in the UK. Brisland graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2004 and is currently a Lecturer in Fine Art (Painting) at the School of Art at Aberystwyth University. She has exhibited internationally, including in Japan, New York, London, and Berlin. Her work has appeared in group and solo exhibitions, including at the Barbican Centre in London, 24 Stunden Neukölln in Berlin, and Agora Gallery in New York. During this time, she has won several prizes, including the prestigious Jackson's Painting Prize in 2018 and, most recently, the Beep Painting Prize in 2024. Interviews and features are included in Create! Magazine, Floorr Magazine, and Jackson's Painting Prize.
Charlotte Brisland's compositions serve as portraits of solitude and unsettling isolation. Each focal point—whether a tree or a house—appears alone in the landscape, unpeopled and quiet.
Brisland reimagines the fluidity of paint through historical techniques and direct surface manipulation, using each canvas as a space for a deeply personal yet ever-evolving exploration of the uncanny through colour.
Drawn from ordinary life and intensified by a saturated palette with surreal elements, the applied motifs of house, tree, and landscape engage with Freud's concept of the uncanny, shifting between familiarity and unease. This psychological approach reveals how trauma reshapes perception, making ordinary experiences feel both familiar and strangely altered, as repressed emotions surface through hue and shifting forms.
Artist Statement
The compositions act as portraits of solitude and isolation. Each singular object of focus—a tree or a house—is alone in a landscape. Unpeopled and waiting, the motifs are from ordinary life and portray the everyday, ignored, or assumed objects of the vernacular. The paintings hang on Freud’s text of the uncanny and play with layers of perception, which he describes and analyzes. The perceptions following trauma are relatable, ordinary, and human. Exploring this in paint is an ongoing and fascinating investigation. Color and form reroute and metamorphosize in endless and alternative ways. Sometimes engaging with historical painting applications or playing directly on the surface, the paintings become an arena to reimagine and engage with how paint is unpredictable. Each painting is a whole journey—deeply personal, a repetition of the same, and constantly changing over and over.
www.charlottebrisland.com
