Emmaline Kenny

Biography

Emmaline Kenny is a multimedia artist based in Boston, Massachusetts. Her work employs welded sculpture and installation to explore personal narratives relating to gender, contradiction, mourning, and relationships to the body. Kenny's cage-like structures often appear too spindly to support themselves, or evoke skeletons stripped from a larger whole. Various objects are occasionally enclosed within, playing with expressions of protection, entrapment, and
refusal to let go.

Artist Statement

Structures is a series of welded and ceramic works which can be installed modularly to create environments evoking barren yet fantastical landscapes. With varying levels of abstraction and surreal use of scale, these modular works take the forms of charred trees, monuments, and ruins. Caverns, doorways, and spikes flit between inviting the viewer in and keeping them at arm’s length. The objects’ skeletal forms draw heavily from gothic architecture and minimalist sculpture of the 60s; the use of monochromatic metal rod draws the eye to the structures’ symmetrical and mathematical linework. The choice of material and use of cold-bending techniques allow me to test my physical strength and take up space in new ways, literally and metaphorically. As viewers walk inside and around the pieces, lines intersect in new ways and new shapes take form. Viewers can also enter the larger works, experiencing them as their own environments and recontextualizing the surrounding area as something ‘outside’ their barred enclosure. Taking inspiration from historical architecture and minimalist object-making of the sixties, these Structures are both physically imposing and delicate, emotive and elusive, and are rooted in the physicality of creating.

Website: emmalinevkenny.wixsite.com/emmaline-kenny

Instagram: @emmaline.v.k