The first and the last trip
George Kennedy
Opening: 5.30pm, Friday 11 April 2025
Exhibition: 12 April – 17 May 2025
Project Space, Contemporary Art Tasmania
I’ve always been pretty interested in Aussie dudes and their larrikin behaviour. My older brother and I would walk over the hill to Rokeby when I was a kid to hang out with his friends while they punched cones and practiced graffiti in a shed. We’d pile four of us onto my uncle’s old Yamaha DT175 in the fields behind Clarendon Vale — one on the handlebars, two on the seat and one standing on the pegs. It was where I learned how to ride, and where I probably got my interest in fire and burned out shit.
Growing up as a girl I always felt like I was looking into another world, a totally different perspective which I admired and yearned for. I hung out with the boys as I got older and played around with different substances, set off fireworks and did some of my own god awful graffiti.
It’s been hard to watch a lot of the people I grew up with fall into substance abuse, or lose them to suicide. The first and the last times I did acid, about ten years apart, were trips facilitated by two exceptional guys we’ve now lost.
These paintings are loose and probably half cooked, but raw, with a couple decades of layered memories of people and place. They’re based on drawings and photos I took during my last trip. A trip in those same Clarendon Vale fields where I learned how to use a spray can, ride a motorbike and make a Gatorade, garden-hose, alfoil bong.
George Kennedy is an emerging artist based in Nipaluna/Hobart, Lutruwita/Tasmania. Kennedy graduated from the School of Arts & Media, University of Tasmania in 2020, going on to hold his first solo exhibition at Devonport Regional Gallery in 2022, and his first major exhibition at Despard Gallery in 2024. Kennedy won the Tasmanian Portrait Prize in 2019, as well as the National Macquarie Group Emerging Artist Prize in 2020. He has been a finalist in the Henry Jones Art Prize in 2023 and 2022, as well as the TIDAL prize in the same year. Kennedy completed two artist residencies at Queenstown in 2021 and 2024, as well as a two-month long residency on King Island in 2023. He has engaged with communities all around Tasmania, running workshops and facilitating locals to express themselves creatively.