Angela Kennedy Tyne and Wear, United Kingdom
I am a multi-disciplinary artist, activist, and feminist with a disability; my work is interdisciplinary in nature. I often work in Embodied Movement Processes, such as BMC / Body-Mind Centering and dance as a means to develop my drawing, painting, writing and performance work. With over thirty years’ experience of community art and women’s participatory work. I am a freelance artist for BALTIC.
Artist Statement I am an interdisciplinary disabled artist, feminist, with a multi-disciplinary practice in dance, performance and fine art.
A degree in Performance Art and ten years working as a Choreographer and Contemporary Dancer; followed by a degree in Creative Practice - major Fine Art and an MA in Fine Art in 2017. My work is about embodied processes and the body rooted in the experiential training of Body-Mind Centering in the USA and Germany and many years as a practitioner of Contact Improvisation and Release.
I am interested in how my inherently embodied practice of responding to site and mark making manifests into performance installation, drawing, text, poetry, movement, walking, spoken word, sound and video, with a physical disability which is now acute.
I am currently exploring listening to my body and seeing how adapting my practice to recent circumstances, regarding mobility issues and periods of intense pain over the last year, using improvised movement and mark making scores arising from embodied experiences, with drawing and painting as walking. My current research is through a PhD with the University of Sunderland investigating how I can integrate these powerful new experiences through feminist responses to rural spaces. Then finding ways to translate those responses into installations, performances, and exhibitions, often with a live audience.
Through my Walking Practice and Drawing as Text, I have combined my practice-based research on feminist theory of embodiment and the reclaiming of rural territory, through artist led workshops on the different body systems. This includes walking in woodland environments, where writing, drawing and authentic movement responses focus on the senses and principles of Body -Mind Centering.
In my MA in Fine Art I examined Feminist Art Theories, Feminist Geography and Drawing - through art walking in urban environments, through scaled text, automatic and stream of consciousness writing, performance, video and audio works. Culminating in a body of work called 'Vein'.
I am one of the founding member of the first Artists Trade Union in England for Visual and Socially Engaged Artists: AUE- Artists Union England, Executive member 2012-18
My socially engaged practice overlaps my own art practice, both areas of my practice reflect a lifelong focus on issues concerning social justice, identity and gender. This might include, for example, walking with others in participatory projects in rural settings as well as within urban communities, so as to discover and engage with people in small but powerful ways, through gentle conversations about their communities and lives, with responses through mark making, drawing, text, poetry and acts of collective performance poetry.
