Despite Numerous Attempts to Contact You
Jill Kennedy-McNeill
11 – 29 September 2019
Evening opening: Thursday 12 September 6-8 pm
Artist’s Talk: Saturday 14 September 2.30 pm
‘Despite Numerous Attempts to Contact You’ is a body of work that explores the relationship between personal finance and mental health.
In Despite Numerous Attempts to Contact You, the gallery space represents a domestic environment with furniture that confines and restricts, echoing the debilitating lethargy that comes with depression and anxiety. Textile designs feature letters from debt collection agencies about loan defaults that occurred during this three month period, as well as excerpts from personal communications with family and friends. Prints have been influenced by vapourwave aesthetics both for their reference to creating alternative realities as a coping mechanism, and the genre’s listless critique of late capitalism.
Jill Kennedy-McNeill is a multidisciplinary Artist and Educator. Working predominantly with textiles, text and memes she produces site specific installations and soft sculpture, among other things. Outcomes are often concerned with issues of inherited and constructed identity, particularly focusing on economics, housing and feminism. She draws on her own experiences as well as engaging in collaborative community projects to inform her practice. Using gallows humour, her work often attempts to make sense of life as a vulnerably housed, precariously employed womxn artist in one of the world’s most expensive and ruthlessly competitive cities.
Three months of earning no money as a result of being precariously employed, inspired this body of work. The artist takes a critical swipe at the neoliberal culture of ‘self-care’ that seeks to place responsibility for a successful life squarely at the feet of the individual and in so doing, ignores the wider socio-economic factors that contribute to personal and societal struggles.
Jill exhibits work across the UK, teaches, runs community workshops, and is currently undertaking research into the impact of arts-based outreach projects on disenfranchised and marginalised groups.
