Exhibition: Izzie Beirne - By the Ruins I Often Pass

Izzie Beirne's By the Ruins Often I Pass is a touring exhibition hosted by Second Act.

A new body of oil paintings navigating domesticity, fairytales and female rage through a melancholic lens. Moments of everyday softness set against entrapment and the burning down of the idea of home.

Opening event: 5th June 5.30 - 7.30pm
Exhibition Runs: 30th May - 16th June (Tues - Sat 11 - 4.45pm)
Venue: Blackburn Museum & Art Gallery, Museum St, Blackburn, BB1 7AJ

Izzie Beirne’s first institutional solo exhibition, By The Ruins Often I Pass, unfolds at Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery as a tightly orchestrated meditation on domestic space, narrative incompletion and latent violence.

Working across a dynamic range of scales, Beirne’s recent paintings oscillate between moments of hushed intimacy and visual intensity. Scenes of quotidian tenderness — a fogged window catching the last light of sunset, the soft blur of a bathroom interior — are rendered with a disarming gentleness that resists irony. Set against these are compositions charged with voyeurism and containment: a butterfly caught within a mouldy window frame, or a lone figure receding from view, suspended between departure and disappearance.

The exhibition’s conceptual centre coalesces in The House No Longer Represented Anything Good, in which a burning house emerges as both image and allegory, destabilising the home as a site of sanctity and exposing it instead as a place of psychic and symbolic rupture. 

Across the works, Beirne mobilises a visual language that draws from folklore, nursery rhyme and inherited narrative structures, yet resists resolution. Meaning remains deliberately partial, gesturing toward what cannot be fully articulated.

The exhibition title borrows from Upon the Burning of Our House (1666) by Anne Bradstreet, situating Beirne’s inquiry within a longer lineage of domestic loss and devotional reflection. This gesture underscores the artist’s ongoing engagement with the persistence of myth within contemporary subjectivity.

Beirne (b.1996, Newcastle upon Tyne) completed her BA at Leeds Arts University and her MFA at Goldsmiths, University of London. A recipient of the Almacantar Award and studio residency (2023), she has exhibited widely across London and internationally, including presentations with Guts Gallery, Moosey and Plan X Milan.

The exhibition is realised in partnership with The Second Act, whose programme foregrounds artists from Northern England and working-class backgrounds, positioning this collaboration as both a regional and critical intervention within current institutional frameworks.