Eileen Kenny Art

Tuesday, 25 June 2013

When Recycling Goes Wrong (Installation)

My work is concerned with exploring the phenomenon of compulsive hoarding. I do so through appropriation of a range of imagery originated by someone else’s hand. I try to mirror the hoarder’s excessive acquisition and inability to discard huge amounts of objects by collecting and also making numerous original images. I create detailed copies of imagery and arrange them together; the completed collage is then obliterated by dripping and splashing paint, to mirror the level of dirt which collects naturally on the excessive collections of hoarders. All items which hold the images and paint splashes were found in skips and these are then arranged into an installation arranged to mirror the experience of walking through the home of a compulsive hoarder.

Various types of plastic bags have also been incorporated into the installation as these are also common items which everyone tends to save or perhaps ‘hoard’. I am particularly interested in the human behaviours involved in our need to continuously re-engage the past by consciously or subconsciously reconfiguring certain preferred elements of a particular culture or period of time. I specifically include the original found images that I have made my own paintings and drawings of, to play a game by quite literally showing how appropriation recontextualises whatever it borrows to create a new work, a new hoard.

Eileen Kenny

eileen_kenny@hotmail.com
www.eileenkennyart.blogspot.com