Isabella Kennedy

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.

Tell us about your creative process, what drives your practice?

My current practice explores processes of perception and spatial relationships through the braided motifs of falling, suspending, and interweaving – porous in-between states defined by slippery thresholds. I’ve thought a lot about falling, gravity and grief – the notion of gravitas and its positive salve levity, and the historical associations between falling and failing – a condition that lies at the heart of creative research praxis. Artmaking for me is in part an attempt to remediate the metonymic fears of falling/failing, reframed instead as fissures for novelty and interconnection. It’s a leaning in and letting go.

I feel excited when a rhythm or conversation starts to develop across a constellation of works, and something unexpected arises – this sounds corny, but it feels like poetry, which I draw a lot of inspiration from. It’s a beautiful thing that the stationary body can be moved through verse, the same as when watching dance – mirror neurons – and I think I try to foster some of that motion in every work. Being ADHD might have something to do with this as well. Examining, inducing, and exploring movement – importantly the movement between – that less visible bit – is a key aspect of my practice and thinking. Often these movements are ancillary and subtle.

What draws you to photographic methodologies and how are these utilised in your practice? 

I grew up on images. Family slide nights were spent glued to the projector, pawing through plastic yellow boxes of transparent positives bordered by meticulously scrawled captions. Crisp floating images of kin felt somehow nearer despite the displacements of time and space. Each moment documented and filed carefully as if it might disappear again. Leafing through our photo albums in childhood, I was acutely aware of family narratives of loss on both sides, through bereavement, missing persons, and members of the Stolen Generation. These gaps and absences could charge the air with weighted silence, and photographs as fragments took on a tangible autonomy, hovering out of time. This kind of invisible mesh of lived experiences that are unaccounted for has always stuck with me.

The anachronistic ‘present’ quality of a photographic image, its ability to straddle multiple temporalities, being both of time and beyond it somehow – yet, also subject to material decay – has always fascinated me.

In my practice, the process of gleaning and collating images represents a desire to filter and recoup some aspect of perception, on my own terms, from the overwhelming stream of visual media. I often feel a disorienting sense of falling when sifting through information and images, so reprocessing this material functions as a grounding exercise. 

Working between different photographic languages, from found images to darkroom techniques and traditional screen printing methods, I try to highlight multiple shifting registers of experience, bending vision back towards (the act of looking) itself. The scanner also forms an important intermediary in this exchange, reaching beyond my sight to fossick hidden dimensions.

Oscillating between numerous dichotomies, including perception and the self. How do you explore these as subjects? 

Within the work, as in my personal life, I’m always trying to balance disparate elements to achieve internal equilibrium, pitched somewhere between serenity and turbulence. I think this manifests as an interest in interstitial spaces. I like to try and see and experience things from every angle, moving within and without, through and around. I think there’s a degree of uncertainty in how I work, or a lack of trust in what I’m seeing and sensing, so this process of searching is both a method and a safeguard.  

Playing with dialectical tensions between states, such as motion and stasis, clarity and dissolution, encourages flexible and adaptive thinking. I like to see the work as an open system for this reason, with fluid, movable parts that can shrink and expand like an amoeba. I guess it’s a bit of a brain-training exercise that exists in part as a testament to those fluctuating internal conditions. Many of the materials I use often carry a value of translucence and/or reflectivity that activate the atmospheric properties of light and air, evoking a sense of transience and indeterminacy.

Can you expand on the role of spatial relationships and embodied engagement within your works? 

I try to incorporate elements that invite slow looking through contrasting tensions. Playing with formal devices such as scale, opacity, orientation, and materiality helps to induce a kind of haptic visuality, where the eye is encouraged to move across and ‘touch’ the surface of a work. I like that kind of sensory inversion. Images that have an intimate tactility start to register physically in an embodied process of looking. I think that’s why I’ve always been drawn to materials such as wax, graphite, and ballpoint pen ink for their relationship to the hand, correspondence, and institutional learning. In the past, I’ve worked a lot with fragments of text from intimate handwritten exchanges, as an invocation of the gesture – a drawing forth of spirit through trace. These materials have carried and kept our secrets over great distances and timescales, but they’re also sturdy, quotidian, and industrial.

Are there any female printmakers | artists that influence you?

I love Mieko Shiomi’s Spatial Events series for its poetic and improvisational approach to  participatory art. Shiomi’s simple and accessible propositions invite us to zoom in and out between internal witness and broader external relations, interweaving spatial planes and durations. With a focus on experience and impermanence, I think they embrace chance in a really understated way, allowing ideas to settle in you quietly and then expand. Shiomi was also classically trained, and many of her prompts carry the sense of a musical score.

The local print community also comprises so many inspiring female artists. It feels as if  printmaking is having a renaissance, and many of the women I’ve studied alongside and been taught by – such as our Head of Department, Carolyn McKenzie-Craig – are stretching the traditional limits of the medium, which is very exciting!

Finally, what exciting projects are you working on at the moment?

I’m about to begin the final year of my MFA at the National Art School, enjoying a lull over summer between first and second-year programs. So far, the research process has been one of shedding and renewal, as some ideas crystallise, and others fade away. I increasingly integrate sculptural processes such as welding into my practice and am excited to get back to the studio and play after a few weeks hiatus. 

I also have some work in the upcoming exhibition Selected at CBD Gallery in Wynyard,  curated by Andrew Totman, showing alongside a group of wonderful artists whose practices converge at the intersection of printmaking and photography.