Catherine Kennedy is a painter and installation artist who lives and works in Sydney and the Blue Mountains.

Inherit

Catherine began her art studies at the National Art School, Darlinghurst and has recently completed an M.F.A. by research at COFA/UNSW Art and Design.

Some of Catherine’s recent solo exhibitions include No direction home (AD space) and Just passing through (Black box) UNSW Art and Design (2015), Catherine Kennedy at Colorida. Colorida Gallery, Lisbon, Portugal (2013), In my mother’s house At the Vanishing Point, Newtown, NSW (2012), Every night I dreamed something happened to my car, Ben Roberts Gallery, Lawson NSW (2010) and Don’t Pay the Ferryman, The Landship (Sydney Harbour Authority), Georges Heights NSW (2008).

“Being privy to Catherine Kennedy’s world is not a prosaic experience. It is a different kind of experience altogether. In her world, things don’t just exist, they exist within other things: a relational attitude that invariably positions her work at a critical juncture between poetry and polemics. We may not find the journey easy, but what we do get is a piece of the action, the real deal. She gives us the inside story: the rest is up to us. Kennedy invites us to explore an alternative reality that exists beyond our own limiting structures. Invoking the language of dreams – the associative, symbolic and metaphoric – she translates the experiences that populate her subconscious in order to assert a break from the structural spell. 

Apparently unrelated images, hues and textures vie for attention, yet the arrangements are hardly serendipitous. They are as judicious as her use of material and technique: pop culture cut+paste of transfers and raw directness of stencil art – both references to the now of our age – doveta

il with a repeated patterning so emblematic of tradition. This form of montage is the artist’s expression of her subconscious – both real and imagined. It is a compelling approach. Despite the strongly autobiographical content, our engagement is secured: we can transcend the idiosyncracy of Kennedy’s inner world because, when articulated via the subconscious, the limiting structures that are shown to construct her identity – within family, community, and society in general – are recognisably those that also construct ours.”

– Excerpt from catalogue essay for In my mother’s house ATVP Newtown. March, 2012 by Mike Barnard