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Bridget Kennedy

Allenheads
Bridget Kennedy lives in the midst of a post-industrial landscape on the outskirts of a remote North Pennine village in the UK. Through installation, sculpture, photography and video she investigates
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Bridget Kennedy (b. 1970 Netherlands) is a compulsive organiser. She uses systemisation as a survival tactic, as a means of creating a little quietness amidst the clamor of modern life. She lives on the outskirts of a small village in the North of England. Whilst seeking out wildness and wilderness through interaction with nature she succumbs to the ever present desire to tame and control. She sees herself as a librarian of the landscape, constantly cataloguing. A fascination with maps brings together her two main interests: landscape and the translation of information. Looking is an activity that is under constant scrutiny in Kennedy's practice, with regard to cartography she is intrigued by the leap of imagination that a map-reader undergoes in order to understand a three dimensional environment when looking at a set of symbols on a piece of paper. She expects her viewers to work together with her on their relationship with her pieces, giving clues in titles such as "Trying to understand the creation of the universe with beads and wire" and "Every letter is a number, every number is a colour (creation myths one and two)". There are two main strands to her practice, one is studio based and one is work made in response to place. She uses drawing, sculpture, photography and moving image in conjunction with the study of historical, critical and literary texts to aid her research and sustain her practice. In recent studio based work she has been re-coding texts and images that relate to landscape then meticulously hand replicating this information to create complex drawings and sculptures. Cool and impersonal at first glance these works expose a very human fragility on closer inspection. Imperfections resulting from the hand-made, homespun and irrational character of the romantic subtly compete with the rigid framework.

 

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