Katherine Kennedy

‘Enmeshment’ is a psychological concept which describes relationships where boundaries have eroded, leading to toxic emotional co-dependency or an “unhealthy symbiosis.” This immersive piece uses a combination of organic/inorganic elements to create an alternate lens for viewing a tropical landscape, subverting the stereotypical, flat image of ‘paradise’ often portrayed of the Caribbean. The synchronized movements of the embellished shells are mesmerizing yet unsettling when coupled with the echoes of distorted environmental sounds, and the plexus that entraps them as they contract and vanish. This interplay of enchantment and tension is familiar in the Caribbean, alluding to the region’s reliance on our landscape to entice a touristic gaze, but feeling the cost and constriction when it comes to agency, autonomy and identity. Enmeshment internalizes this complex reality, and both utilizes & scrutinizes the concept of escapism, playing with external and internal fantasies that are projected onto the social and physical environment.

Katherine Kennedy is a Barbadian artist and writer. She graduated with a BA in Creative Arts (First Class Hons.) from Lancaster University, UK, and has exhibited locally, regionally and internationally in Barbados, London, Glasgow, the USA, Aruba, Jamaica, Nigeria, New Zealand, South Korea, Trinidad & Tobago and Canada to date. She currently works for the Fresh Milk Art Platform in Barbados as the Communications and Operations Manager, and has contributed to ARC Magazine of contemporary Caribbean art as a Writer, Editor and the Assistant to Director. Through these platforms, she has coordinated and managed programs such as five editions of the Caribbean Linked residency & exhibition program at Ateliers ’89, Aruba, and the biennial Transoceanic Visual Exchange (TVE) international video, film and new media exhibition. 

Katherine's visual practice is heavily tied to a sense of place, using interplay between organic and inorganic materials and imagery to interrogate the spectrum of belonging and displacement in different environments or cultural contexts. She has undertaken projects and residencies at the Insituto Buena Bista (IBB), Curaçao (2012); The Vermont Studio Center, USA (2013); Casa Tomada, Brazil (2013); Akademie Schloss Solitude, Germany (2014); and Punch Creative Arena, Barbados (2019 & 2020). Her written work has been published with platforms such as Sugarcane Magazine (Volume 1, Issue No. 3) and Robert & Christopher Publishers in the A-Z of Caribbean Art (2019). She made her debut as a solo-curator with the exhibition Social Geometry: Expanded Drawing Practices by Barbadian Artists at the Queen’s Park Gallery, Barbados in May 2019, and was selected as a fellow in the CCCADI Afro-Caribbean Art Curatorial Fellowship in 2021.