George Kennedy is an emerging artist based in Hobart, Tasmania. His practice explores the fringe areas of the Tasmanian landscape, where the expansion of urbanisation encroaches on natural spaces. Kennedy is particularly drawn to the complexity of these boundaries, where the lines and forms of the manmade and organic converge. Through paint, Kennedy interprets these spaces using a combination of abstraction and figuration, responding to encounters between body and the material environment. His work employs rich colour, bold lines and dynamic compositions to represent the changing stability of these areas, visualising spaces that elude easy categorisation or representation.
At the heart of Kennedy’s practice is an intuitive approach, developing a visual language that evokes a sense of transition, moments of clarity and structure, which shift into vigorous turbulence. Kennedy’s work highlights this alteration of the landscape, bringing awareness to the fragile balance between Tasmania’s natural assets and its urban inhabitants.
George Kennedy studied Fine Arts at the University of Tasmania, recently holding a solo exhibition at the Devonport Regional Gallery. Kennedy won the Tasmanian Portrait Prize in 2019, as well as the national Macquarie Group Emerging Artist Prize in 2020. In 2021, he was a finalist in the Peebles Print Prize, Victoria, completing a Q Bank Gallery artist residency at Queenstown the same year. In 2023, Kennedy completed a two-month long artist residency on King Island.
Exhibitions
