Bunny Hennessey is a London-based painter whose work emerges from the physical and sensory conditions of painting itself. Driven by motion, pressure and tempo, her practice explores the body’s inner parameters; how sensation accumulates, disperses, and reorganises through movement.
Working intuitively across oil, acrylic, and watercolour, her work unfolds in a visceral, reactive process; the mind’s input eclipsed by the body; unbound improvisations propelled by intrinsic rhythm. Sweeping gestures give way to compressed, insistent marks; periods of speed interrupted by hesitation and reflection. Paint is applied, scraped back, and reintroduced, surfaces seesawing between density and exposure. Colour is drawn out through appetite; pigments that feel edible, evoking taste, texture, excess.
Works exist in a continual state of flux, hovering between abstraction and somatic suggestion, where forms surface briefly before dissolving, as if caught mid-transformation. Brushstrokes function less as representation than as residue: traces of emotional exertion recorded through sequences of unconscious physical reactions. She describes approaching the canvas “as a surface that holds sensation outside the body", the painting becoming a container for corporeal tension, an inhabited structure where sensation is displaced, reworked, and transformed rather than confessed. It is through this ongoing negotiation between body and material that Hennessey’s work opens up a space for release and renewal—not as resolution, but as a continual process of reappraisal.
Born in 1991, Bunny Hennessey grew up in coastal Devonshire. She is currently in the final year of an MFA at Slade School of Fine Art, following an undergraduate at City & Guilds of London Art School, where she received First Class Honours. In 2024 she was awarded the Freeland’s Painting Prize. Her work has been shown at Chilli Art Projects, London in duo exhibition ‘Constrain’, as well as through Roamer Project II, where she was selected for the Val d’Aran edition of the group show in the Pyrenees.
EXHIBITIONS
2025 Slade Interim Show, Slade School of Fine Art, London
2025 The Roamer Project, Madrid
2024 35.5714286cm, Slade Painting Interim Show, London
2024 Constrain, Chilli Art Projects, London
2024 Freelands Foundation Painting Prize, Camden, London
2024 City and Guilds of London Art School BA Fine Art Degree Show, Kennington, London
2023 From the Studio, City and Guilds of London Art School Interim Show, Symes Mews, Camden, London
2022 Impressions, City and Guilds of London Art School Interim Show, Ugly Duck, Bermondsey, London
EDUCATION
2024 - 2026 MA Fine Art: Painting, Slade School of Art, London, UK
2021 - 2024 BA (Hons) Fine Art, City and Guilds of London Art School, London, UK
2009 - 2010 Art Foundation, Central Saint Martins, UAL, London, UK
AWARDS
2024 Freelands Painting Prize - winner
2024 New Blood Emerging Art Prize - Nominated
2021 Painter Stainers Prize - shortlisted