Feeling spaces

grounding the body in architectural atmosphere

23 – 25 September 2020

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) candidate, Francis Kenna, presented his exhibition for examination in the ANU School of Art & Design Gallery in September this year.

Kenna is an emerging artist based in Canberra, Australia, whose spatial practice spans installation, sculpture, printmedia and drawing. His practice is an ongoing investigation of perception and our engagement with the world around us. His work often takes place as a series of experiments and interventions in architectural space, centred on our temporal and embodied perception of space, objects and atmospheric phenomena.

“My research is an argument for embodiment and duration in architectural space, a theory of spatial hospitality that attempts to make some room for the subject as a spatial being. My practice-led research has taken the form of a series of spatial installations and interventions in spaces and places that emerge as diffuse, multisensory atmospheres. Atmospheres unfold as a felt relationship between a space and its inhabitant. They are topological, multiperspectival experiences of place that are co-produced with the subject through their perceptual, embodied and temporal engagement with a living present.”

Francis Kenna holds a Bachelor of Arts (Visual) (First Class Honours) from the Australian National University, Canberra. He is a current PhD candidate in the School of Art & Design and his research explores the felt experience of architectural atmospheres, duration and spatial perception. Kenna has held a number of solo exhibitions and was included in Expanded Architecture: Temporal Formal in 2015, where he staged a large-scale public installation at Grosvenor Place, Sydney by Australian architect Harry Seidler. In 2018 he was awarded the 2018 Capital Arts Patrons’ Organisation (CAPO) Curatorial Internship Award and in 2019 he curated Formfull : Formless, the 5th CAPO Emerging Artists’ Exhibition and Prize.

The Gallery is currently closed to the public due to the pandemic and we are following restrictions as prescribed by ANU.