Simone Kearney

Simone Kearney is a Dublin-born, Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist and writer. Her practice is an inquiry — as much visual as it is psychological — into how experience is a cobbled, fragile thing, shapeshifting, subject to time, configured and reconfigured through our bodies. In recent projects, she has been working with hand-carved stone sculpture, watercolor, and text, where the work starts to gather like archaeological fragments of the psyche. Dealing in the realm of what floats beneath the surface of consciousness — dreams, ruminations, and archetypal symbols — Kearney creates fields of objects that exist somewhere between rune and cartoon, between suggestive remnant and semi-emergent fact. In her playful receptivity to the raw stuff of stone, earth, pigment in water, or language itself, she explores all kinds of lively materialities. The tangible becomes an occasion for the intangible to reveal itself. Images arise from matter’s ambiguous zones of reference and into the nameable: as ovals, hands, eyes, vessels, ghosts, voids, animals, bodies. Forms are made and unmade. Kearney currently has a solo show of sculptures and works on paper entitled DIGS at Guest Gallery in Brooklyn, NY, on view from September 20th – November 8th. She also will have sculptures in a group exhibition at Koki Arts in Tokyo, Japan, this October. Some previous solo exhibitions include Putty’s Coronation, Brooklyn, NY; Undercurrent Gallery, Brooklyn New York; Artshack Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; and Annex Gallery, Lighthouse Works, Fisher’s Island, NY. She is a NYFA grant recipient and is the author of Dim, Dahlia, Violet, Stone, (ITI Press, 2024), DAYS, (Belladonna Press, 2021), and My Ida (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017). She teaches at Parsons School for Design and Rutgers University. Hand (Riddle is everywhere/Because a grain shatters direction), 2025, alabaster, earth, pine pedestal, 11” X 11.5” X 36” Water Stone (xviii), 2024, watercolor on paper, 22” x 30” “Hole:Through (One by one, to see),” 2025, rhy ... pine pedestal, 11” X 11.5” X 35