www.isabellakennedy.com.au
@isa.kennedy
Informed by family narratives of loss, disappearance and displacement, my work explores intergenerational grief and communal power dynamics through the weighted metaphor of falling. Shifting movement registers, such as disequilibrium and suspension, are invoked to trace thresholds of (in)tolerance between love and fear, separation and interdependence, control and release. My practice asks – who gets to fall? Who has the liberty to yield, and who is pushed? As a universal but unequally experienced phenomenon, falling exposes asymmetrical power relations, revealing how we rely on, resist and often fail one another.
Dialectical tensions arise through the symbolic reprise of the parachute, a safety device that infers danger. Entangled skeins and rippling cavities of nylon float, twist and contort across surfaces in quiet and unfamiliar ways, evoking a paradoxical sense of threat and interconnection. Interior and exterior spaces curve and cleave. They are inverted, amplified, open and slowed, as a porous and opaque refusal, reflecting repeated attempts to both hold on and let go – asking what it means to be held.
