new website



thank you for coming to look through my art practice on this blog, years ago i really did put love and attention into this web presence but i've totally neglected updating it for so long that i've moved on to greener platforms, so please take a peek at my site to see that i have actually been keeping busy to make even bigger and stranger creatures...

-->http://www.talithakennedy.com/

 

RENDEZVOODOO

Summer residency with my Adelaide family, Fontanelle Gallery and Studios in January 2014. Their Art Scene Satellite project brought me to collaborate with the amazing painter and sculptor Anna Gore. A heartfelt colourist who helped me learn to trust instinct and let magic happen. From chats about surface and unseen forces I made my largest work to date, a large suspended work of leather spilling from the ceiling to the floor and looking ready to pounce and swallow you into its flayed flesh shadow. I really loved hanging out with the many bright and lovely folks that make up the amazing Fontanelle. Good job Brigid Noone and Ben Leslie!

RENDEZVOODOO
2nd March – 30th March 2014
Fontanelle Gallery and Studios, Adelaide, South Australia
Curated by Brigid Noone
  • Elvis Richardson (Melbourne) with Madison Bycroft – writer Chloe Langford (Berlin/SA)
  •  Talitha Kennedy (Darwin) with Anna Gore – writer Roy Ananda (SA)
  •  Oscar Perry (Melbourne) with Benjamin Leslie – writer Sera Waters (SA)
www.fontanelle.com.au/rendez-voodoo/


Installation shot RENDEZVOODOO. (Front) Talitha Kennedy, Weeping Hiding Place, 2014. Leather & thread. Dimensions variable (ceiling height 3 metres).

Installation shot RENDEZVOODOO with works by Anna Gore and Talitha Kennedy

Installation shot RENDEZVOODOO with works by Talitha Kennedy (drawings), Anna Gore (painting and pick sculpture), Elvis Richardson (video and works on paper, right down the end)

Installation shot RENDEZVOODOO. Anna Gore's black fur covered sculpture in front.

Envisioning Gods

I landed cold back in Melbourne in July 2013, no longer in tropical Darwin. I set up studio at Rubicon ARI, care of Australia Council’s ArtStart funding. Straight away I made a new work for Siying Zhou’s show in which I channeled my experiences of crumbling European built environment where I felt both belonging and other so I built something of a fetish to that feeling.

Envisioning Gods
31 July - 17 August 2013.
Rubicon ARI, Melbourne
Simon Cooper, Penelope Hunt, Talitha Kennedy, Jayne McSwiney, Jonathon Saunders, 
Siying Zhou (Curator)
Envisioning Gods presents a broad perspective and diverse voices examining the subject of belief and spirituality in modern societies. It draws attention to and re-appraises the value of wishful thinking, heroic culture, biotechnology, Zen and Christianity through six individual works: a drawing of a personal memory on a religious event; a sculptural installation that offers a ritualistic experience to the audience; a metaphoric photographic image; a stencil painting that reveals the banality of the daily lives of superheros; a fetish altar with leather constructions; a series of blueprints on boards that depict half human hybrid creatures.Envisioning Gods intends to engage audiences both visually and physically.


Installation shot, Envisioning Gods, Rubicon ARI.

Talitha Kennedy, Kill to Build, 2013. Leather, thread, synthetic stuffing and found demolition blocks. Approx 130 cm H.



Detail: Talitha Kennedy, Kill to Build, 2013.

Detail: Talitha Kennedy, Kill to Build, 2013. 

Europa

Scraping out the last trips from my Qantas funding, I headed all about Europe from May to July 2013. Starting London then Cornwall for pirate coast and moors, to Bath for Roman ruins, Northampton for the kooky Leathercraft Museum and London trawling museums. Train to Paris, my highlight the Rodin Museum and Musee du quai Branly, then an amazing week in the French Alps soaking up “Aboriginal” rural France and (wow) real mountains. Train through the Alps to Turin the home of Arte Povera where I stalked Giuseppe Penone. Over to my heart’s home Venice for Biennale binge. Train viewing of more Alps through Germany to another of my hearts’ home – Berlin in summer -bliss. Then all the way back to Australia.

Alps

Alps from train

Giuseppe Penone, La Venaria Reale, Turin

Russian Pavillion, Venice Biennale

Veneziana!













Thing Show

Fontanelle Gallery March 10 - April 12 2013
"The exhibition reflects on the way matter can trap and reveal movement beneath the threshold of our awareness. Featuring Henry Jock Walker, Sarah CrowEST, Brooke Babington, Carla Liesch, Sam Songailo, Emily Taylor and Talitha Kennedy, the artists allow the space to vibrate, transform and respond to their work."

Ben Leslie at Fontanelle Gallery sent out an Elizabeth Grosz article on 'The Thing', it got me all raving about my thoughts on the 'life' of things - such as the trip down entropy lane and the cultural value that classifies all things. For this show I continued building on the series 'Tricks to make earth into flesh', a process that allowed further thinking into my obsession with concrete and how it has become like a human skin over the earth. Ben listened and totally indulged my ravings, growing a great conversation on sculptural process and stuff. I didn't get to Adelaide for the show but the pix look so exciting - brave and elegant curating. 

http://www.fontanelle.com.au/thingshow/
http://nextwave.org.au/event/henry-jock-walker-at-fontanelle/








Hand Held Lands

Solo show at Nomad Art Gallery
5 - 27 April 2013

In this body of work Darwin based artist Talitha Kennedy examines the human relationship with nature in small sculptures and drawings.

Talitha Kennedy’s small hand-stitched sculptures are inspired by the idea of holding a mini-world in your hands.

‘Humans have the power to make big changes to the world. The capability of our technologies give us the power to destroy the land –deforest, make a huge hole in the ground for mining, avert rivers to dam, move mountains for roads. Geographic forms are themselves in transition, formed by moving tectonic plates in constant states of erosion as everything transforms by entropy.

The land as a body, an organism –alive and with spirit’

Mangrove Cluster, 2013. Kangaroo leather, thread & gravel. 14 (h) x 12 x 12 cm.
Holding Hole, 2013. Kangaroo leather, thread & gravel. 8 (h) x 14 x 13cm.
Pounding Mountains, 2013. Kangaroo leather, thread & gravel. 10 (h) x 15 x 14cm.
Mangrove Protrusions (Pnuemetaphores, Propagules, Mangals), 2013. Kangaroo leather, thread & gravel. Dimensions variable from approx 20 - 13 cm height.



New Territories Nov 2012

I received a judges prize at the 24HR ART: NT Centre for Contemporary Art end of year survey 'New Territories' for a collection of works I'd been playing with since experiments in New York studio time. I keep being strangely attracted to bits of concrete I come across and 'growing' fleshy planty organicy forms over them. I call these works Tricks to build earth into flesh.









End of the World

The very lovely folks in fab Adelaide ARI Fontanelle invited me to the End of the World so I drew a big hole. Overcoming the anxiety that life as we know it would end we still made a great show and party that lasted way over the midnight dong from December 21 2012.
www.fontanelle.com.au

Talitha Kennedy, Hope that the world would end when people say it will, 2012. Ink on paper. 78x78cm.



Printmaking night class

Second semester 2012 completed a Charles Darwin University's Visual Art unit in Printmaking. I really loved scratching into metal, acid etching and then playing around with colour inks, yes, colour.

my four colour reduction lino print
an etched plate
black ink etching
rainbow colour variations on my rhizome monster etching
yum


Art on Wheels

September 2012 I was one of a party for DVAA's 'Art on Wheels' project, a super art-mobile that brought an all-sorts of contemporary art practices to Darwin's suburban hotspots.

My contribution:     'Swelter Shelter creates an extended space for Art on Wheels where a large cowhide of tanned black leather forms a tent like enclosure at the rear of the van. The leather has been cut to suggest the forms of shadow and light that tree canopies cast on the ground, like a flayed skin of the visible. This dark visceral canopy shields our own skin from the sweltering sun while drawing attention to the destruction that other life forms suffer for our comfort.'
artonwheels.hotglue.me
www.dvaa.net.au