The stars disordered
The sixteen large charcoal drawings Peter Kennedy has on exhibition at the UAM are preliminary works for a major project for the UAM Australian Bicentennial Authority's National Commissioning's Programme. When completed the commission will consist of two large paintings, a number of smaller ancillary paintings and four, twenty minute television works under the direction of John Hughes. This exhibition will tour all Australian states and Britain commencing at the UAM in April 1988.
These strongly executed and dynamically structured drawings, often utilizing disconcerting angles of view, address the Bicentennary theme of "the future in Australia". This is not an attempt at idle prediction, however, but an investigation of the discourse presently occurring in this country about Australia's future.
As a component of the projected television works John Hughes has commissioned a piece by the writer Chris Barnett and many of the UAM drawings work in relationship to quotes from this text. The wide diversity of concerns expressed is further unified by Kennedy's use of the heart and star as motifs which, although occurring in nearly all the drawings, do so with subtle shifts in signification.
In everything that is built here to he torn/ down while you fall/ out this mirror..., an empty and desolate factory space frames the heart of the worker, displaced by changing economic relationships. In Opened heart - my voice wailing, a bleeding heart hangs above the body of the land, torn out by the violent surgery of open-cut mining. Another drawing presents a heart-landscape based on satellite imagery, reminding us that the way we see and experience the land is conditioned not only culturally but also technologically.
The emotional centre/heartland then, is fluid