-
- Rachael Kennedy
Rachael
Kennedy
Layers of memory - Moments in a room (4th year)
My practice explores how memory is held within domestic space, using my nanny’s house as a lens through which to examine and explore familiarity, identity, and lived experience. I focus on overlooked corners, textures, and details such as the angles of rooms, stairs, patterned wallpaper, and lace curtains. All of which shaped my early sense of home through touch, repetition, and atmosphere. These fragments are like memory itself, layered, partial, and often distorted.
Through drawing, relief printing, laser-cutting, and installation, I dissect the house into sections and reassemble it in new configurations. Rather than recreating whole rooms, I work through surfaces, materials, and textures. By incorporating textiles taken directly from the house, such as the wallpaper, pillowcases, and lace curtains, I embed physical traces of my nanny’s life and choices into the work, allowing material to carry emotional and tactile memory.
Pattern plays a central role in my practice. What might once have been dismissed as excessive becomes a language of taste, class, and preservation, particularly tied to the women who shaped my understanding of home. My installations function as emotional maps, moving between public and private interior life. By removing familiar objects and spaces from their original context, l aim to slow down looking and invite viewers to reconsider what we think we know about the spaces that form us.
This way of working also informs my teaching practice. I approach both making and teaching as reflective processes. Through fragmented, sensory, and responsive making, I encourage close observation, material exploration, and meaning through process as much as outcome.
Layers of home (3rd year)
I explore memory, domestic space, and the quiet rituals of home through printmaking and layered materials. Rooted in personal experience, I reflect on the kitchen as a site of warmth, repetition, and generational memory-specifically the intimate, well-worn space of my nanny’s kitchen. Drawing from family objects, worn textures, and conversations over countless cups of tea, my practice is shaped by themes of time, presence, and nostalgia. In this series, titled “Layers of Home,” I bring together printed images of my nanny’s kitchen using materials closely tied to domestic life-wallpaper, oilcloth, and paint. I print directly onto clear acrylic sheets, allowing layered paint and wallpaper on the reverse to bleed through the image, physically echoing the passage of time and the way memory reveals itself unevenly. Other works are printed on oilcloth, evoking the wipeable, practical surfaces of the kitchen table, while two pieces are on paper: one echoing the oilcloth image, and the other piece features a zoomed-in view of the fridge, showing the small, ordinary details, like old notes and magnets which give it a sense of real life. My process centres around block printing, chosen for its boldness and physicality, allowing strong, shadowy silhouettes that emphasize the presence-and absence-of figures within the space. The technique aligns with my interest in layering and repetition, echoing how memories are built through ongoing rituals and repeated moments. Each material choice connects back to real-life textures and surfaces, embedding meaning into the fabric of the work itself. This series invites the viewer to look through and beneath the surface to uncover the intimate, layered history of a home.