India Kenning: Works in progress

21 July–19 August

Project Space

Works in progress expressed India Kenning’s distinctive interest in the decay, regeneration and micro-ecologies in the ever-changing landscapes of Lutruwita.

Kenning has a background in sculpture and installation. That training informs her painting practice, enabling her to explore and blend a sculptural experience of abstraction and construction with materials and a discipline that is new to her. Her approach to these paintings is the product of recent experimentation with old techniques and technologies: from hand-making tempera medium to exploring mono printing processes. She has been absorbed in working with and building up areas of raw pigment alongside more immediate and fluid painting mediums and techniques.

The paintings in Works in progress were informed by her observations of ecological systems and the environments they erode, accrue, form and reshape. She alluded to specific systems that form these varied landscapes through gestural mark-making and colour, revealing elements of place and her relationship to those environments. Her abstracted narratives are often constructed upon recycled paintings, salvaged industrial canvas and stained materials from the studio. Kenning thinks of her paintings as assemblages of materials. Applying processes of collage, layering, accretion and erosion, the tangible presence of her raw materials is heightened in the works and often align her assembled objects with the natural worlds they reference.