Alison Kennedy wins the 45th Fremantle Arts Centre Print Award

Melbourne-based artist Alison Kennedy has been announced  as the winner of the 2021, $16,000 acquisitive Fremantle Arts Centre Print Award with her work ICU, a large-scale self-portrait. The work was created using white ink screen-printed on 30 industrial poly acrylic panels, and explores women’s work and the hidden labour of underrepresented groups. Kennedy has exhibited widely in Australia and Germany, and recently graduated with a Master of Fine Arts (Research) from Melbourne University, where she won the Fiona Myer Award in 2019. Her work and research have been critically received, and was included in the 10 year survey show of Leipzig International Art Residency (Germany) and in the 2021 ANAT DNA research residency program.

Kennedy’s practice explores the intersection of painting, photography and technology, challenging the standard tropes of portraiture and representation of self in the documentation of museum exhibits. She combines technology, malfunction and handmade media in her work,  grounded in a desire to reveal what is hidden through closely observing the artistic process as it twists and turns. Underneath it all she asks, “when does something make sense?” This often leads to artwork which surprises her as well as others.

ICU, (2019) valorises the female artist in her studio and is part of the artists’ overarching concern with expressing women’s work through meshing technology with printmaking. “The latter is crucial as it is through this refined laborious process that woman’s work is expressed as both method and subject. It is important in my practice that technology acknowledges and represents the role of the human body in perceiving and creating the world,” she says.

Fremantle Arts Centre Print Award judges, Felicity Johnston (Curator and Director, Art Collective WA), Rachel Salmon- Lomas (Printmaking lecturer and technician, Curtin University) and Lia Mcknight (artist and Collection Manager, Curtin University) commented, “Alison Kennedy’s skilfully composed work, ICU, is a brave and poignant portrait of the artist in her studio, her face and body partially obscured by glitches revealing the artist’s use of digital technology. She combines laboriously hand printed silkscreen with 3D modelling techniques, exploiting the effects of pixilation to create a seductive granular quality. Printed onto industrial acrylic sheeting, the work is one of many in the exhibition which is multi-panelled. In this case the glossy, reflective surface provides a sensual quality to the work that mirrors the viewer, placing us within this oversized portrait.”