Nick Kennedy

Artist Statement

My practice has a very specific focus on drawing, which I feel is largely due to its immediacy and flexibility as a medium for the exploration of ideas. A key strand of my work involves the employment of systems or devices to disrupt or interfere with my control over the process of making. Through my practice I aim to explore the notions of order, repetition and serendipity. There is usually some integral part of the process of making that is out of my hands, which informs or even comes to define the construction and aesthetic of a piece of work. In recent works I have allowed the roll of a die to control the composition and form of a drawing, repeating the action thousands of times over to gradually build up the image. There is an important tension between the disciplined and highly repetitive nature of such a process, the detached manner in which the work is made and the desire to retain control over the aesthetic. Sometimes tools or machines are used to mediate my human actions, to bring a level of autonomy into the mark-making, or conversely, to provide a uniform, predictable element to the work. Bicycle wheels, spinning tops, cordless drills and more recently, a windscreen wiper motor have all been utilised to produce drawings. Often I am the manual operator of such objects and my role becomes simply to follow a set of predetermined instructions or rules. Recent work has engaged with installation, site specificity and audience participation, challenging the boundaries of drawing. Central to all my work is the conflict between chance and influence, order and chaos, success and failure, rules and irregularity.