Image: Simone Kennedy, Changeling (a)The Pulchritudinous Fly (detail), 2021, Oil on linen, 200 x 100cm. Photograph Iain Bond.
Creativity and collaboration are at the heart of innovation. Since 2018 UniSA Business has partnered with Guildhouse to present works by contemporary South Australian visual artists to encourage reflection and inspire new ideas.
Changeling a, c & b, The Pulchritudinous (beautiful) Fly
Simone Kennedy
5 August — 7 November 2024
Yungondi Building, UniSA City West Campus
Artist Statement
‘Changeling a, c & b, The Pulchritudinous (beautiful) Fly’ is a triptych that explores the interconnectedness of horror and pleasure, by reimagining how we think about ourselves, through the complexity of our lived experiences. The work aims to invite viewers to contemplate both consciously and unconsciously their own perceptions of ‘self’.
‘Changeling a, c & b, The Pulchritudinous (beautiful) Fly’, offers a triptych with condensed autobiographical images by British/Australian artist Simone Kennedy. These works, part memoir, part re-imagining are a close, intimate highly symbolic and fragmentary, autobiographical record of her lived experience. The ‘events’, are dark, surreal, humorous, mysterious, dramatic and in some cases unexplainable.
About the artist
In Simone Kennedy’s studio-based practice she works with several interconnected themes, the translation of ‘self’, the brain, a symbolic mother figure and the common housefly. Through the interplay of memory, emotion and psychology, she uses the fly to realise the uncanny aspects of her imagination.
Highlights include an acquisition (2016) from ‘Arts & Heritage Collections’, University of Adelaide, funding from Arts SA to travel to the UK to take up residency at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations (TIHR) in 2020-21, participation with UK/AU SEASON, Cultural exchange, 2021-22 (a joint initiative between the British Council and the Australian Government’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade), Finalist in the Mosman Art Prize 2022 and membership with The Royal Society of Sculptors (RSS), London, UK in 2023. She is the recipient of a Peer X Peer residency with Art et al. in partnership with the RSS and Actionspace studios in London. More recently she exhibited in ‘Neoterica’ in partnership with The Adelaide Festival.
Image: Simone Kennedy, Changeling (a)The Pulchritudinous Fly, 2021, Oil on linen, 200 x 100cm. Photograph Iain Bond.
Please note: The UniSA Business School Yungondi Building is open Monday-Friday, 9am-5pm.
