Isabella Kennedy

6. Isabella Kennedy, Tailspin, 2023, screen print on kozo paper, 56.8 x 25.4 cm. NFS.

7. Isabella Kennedy, Billow, 2023, screen print on aluminium, 27 x 23 cm. NFS.

10. Isabella Kennedy, Double Descent, 2023, screen print, graphite on perspex, 40 x 28 cm each. NFS.

11. Isabella Kennedy, Aristotle's Lantern, 2023, screen print on watercolour paper, 112 x 76 cm. $400.

Informed by family narratives of loss and displacement, this suite of work deploys the parachute as a metaphoric device for thinking through notions of recovery, resistance, gravity and grief. As both a safety device and soft weapon, entangled skeins and rippling cavities of nylon float, twist and contort across surfaces in quiet and unfamiliar ways, evoking a paradoxical sense of both threat and interconnection. 

Isabella Kennedy is a multidisciplinary artist, living and working on Gadigal land in Sydney. Drawing from a constellation of photographic languages, Kennedy explores shifting registers of motion through the motif of falling, to consider processes of perception and spatial relationships. We fall together, in love, apart and out of touch – falling is at its heart a relational dialogue. Contrasting strategies of suspension and inversion resist traditional spatial trajectories, while porous and interwoven surfaces seek to activate a sense of haptic, embodied visuality. Dialectical tensions of presence and absence, movement and stasis, separation and interdependence echo through the work, as boundaries soften and edges of the self blur.